UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ

UNBECOMING SILICON VALLEY: TECHNO IMAGINARIES AND

MATERIALITIES IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

FEMINIST STUDIES

by

Erin Mariel Brownstein McElroy

June 2019

The Dissertation of Erin McElroy is approved: ________________________________ Professor Neda Atanasoski, Chair ________________________________ Professor Karen Barad ________________________________ Professor Lisa Rofel ________________________________ Professor Megan Moodie ________________________________ Professor Liviu Chelcea

________________________________ Lori Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies

Copyright © by Erin McElroy 2019

iii

Table of Contents Abstract, iv-v Acknowledgements, vi-xi Introduction: Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania, 1-44 Chapter 1: Digital Nomads in Siliconizing Cluj: Material and Allegorical Double Dispossession, 45-90 Chapter 2: Corrupting Techno-normativity in Postsocialist Romania: Queering Code and Computers, 91-127 Chapter 3: The Light Revolution, Blood Gold, and the New Times of IKEA: Impossible Spaces of Dissent in the Dawn of Techno-fascism, 126-188 Chapter 4: Postsocialism, Technofascism, and the Tech Boom 2.0: From Technologies of Racial/spatial Dispossession to the Dark Enlightenment, 189-252 Chapter 5: Hacking the Inimical of Post-Cold War Time: Mr. Robot, the Dark Army, and the Doomsday Machine, 253-301 Chapter 6. Non-Alignment in Outer Space: From the Ruins of Postsocialist Astrofuturism, 302-336 Epilogue: Blackface on the Nightshift, Proptech AI, and the Posthuman Landlord, 337-344 Bibliography, 345-402 Endnotes, 403-404

iv

Abstract Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania by Erin McElroy

Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in

Postsocialist Romania traces the racial and technocultural worlds tethering

postsocialist Romania and post-Cold War Silicon Valley. Geographically, it traverses

the Romanian cities of Bucharest, Cluj, and Râmnicu Vâlcea, the Molovan city of

Chișinău, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area. Questioning what it means for

postsocialist Romania to desire “becoming” Silicon Valley, it also asks how

imaginaries of illiberal, corrupt postsocialist Eastern Europe informs the post-Cold

War West. Methodologically, I engage ethnography, as well as reading and at times

coproducing technology, maps, speculative fiction, media, infrastructure, and archival

work. While deeply invested in the politics of displacement, I focus upon how

socialist and pre-socialist techno-urban histories are updated, hacked, and rearranged

in postsocialist times.

Analytically, I engage the concept of Silicon Valley imperialism, or the global

condition in which Silicon Valley’s existence is necessitated by its unending growth,

and in which it devours people’s intimate lives and personal data while also

consuming global and even outer space imaginaries in novel ways. Silicon Valley

imperialism deploys what I describe as racial technocapitalism, a concept that I use

to map racial dispossession amidst technocapitalism. Engaging these twin concepts

allows for a decentralized analysis of race, space, politics, and technocultural

reproduction. By tracking their geographic entwinement, I theorize a postsocialist

v

moment. In this way, I read postsocialism as a post-1989 condition that endures on

both sides of the former Iron Curtain, and that recodes configurations of race and

empire today. In this way, I position the current “Tech Boom 2.0” in Silicon Valley as

a postsocialist phenomenon. I also analyze how, as socialist-era techno-culture is

pathologized on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, pre-socialist fascist

technological imaginaries are reinterpreted in the name of anticommunism. And yet,

socialist-era technologies and their aftermaths endure, entwined in wires and

infrastructure, while also coded into hardware and speculative fiction. As I question,

how, by reading technological futures past, might we dream of new technological

futures yet-to-come, futures illegible to Silicon Valley imperialism and racial

technocapitalism alike.

vi

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, this dissertation is dedicated to all of the housing justice

organizers with whom I have had the pleasure of working with in the San Francisco

Bay Area and in Romania. This list of dedicated people is far too great to fully list

here. That said, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am grateful for the ongoing

collaboration with members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the San

Francisco Tenants Union, and the former projects of Eviction Free San Francisco and

the “Oakland School” of Urban Studies. My thinking and political organizing in the

Bay Area has developed with long lists of collaborators from these groups and more,

including Marko Muir, Mary Shi, Terra Graziani, Andrea Miller, Ariel Appel,

Andrew Szeto, Florian Opillard, Carla Leshne, Carla Wojczuk, Adrienne Hall,

Manon Vergerio, Magie Ramírez, Savannah Kilner, Trisha Barua, Divya Sundar, Eli

Merienthal, Claire Urbanski, Maria Acosta, Maureen Rees, Deland Chan, Karyn

Smoot, Alex Schafran, Finley Coyl, Isa Knafo, John Stehlin, Austin Ehrhardt, Tony

Samara, Dawn Phillips, Chris Henrick, Bianca Ceralvo, Stefano Funk, Alexandra

Lacey, Benito Santiago, Jennifer Fieber, Deepa Varma, Aimee Inglis, Dean Preston,

Fred Sherman Zimmer, Rebecca Gourevitch, and Jennifer Cust. In particular my

collaborative writing projects with Manissa M. Maharawal, Andrew Szeto, and Alex

Werth have been especially generative in my troubling of Bay Area racial

dispossession, and I look forward to continued writing projects to come. So many

thanks too to Ted Gullicksen, whose generosity and mentorship lives on in the space

of this work.

I have been spending time learning about contexts of eviction, race, socialist-

vii

era and postsocialist technology, and Silicon Valley imperialism in Romania

since2011, all of which has been made possible through the guidance, support, and

friendship of so many amazing people. I am particularly grateful for members of the

Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, Căși Sociale Acum, Blocul pentru Locuire,

Macaz Bar Coop (and before that, Clacă and the Biblioteca Alternativă), A-casă, and

Ceata—all groups organizing for futures of housing and technological justice-to-

come. Enikő Vincze has been a steady mentor throughout this process, as have a

number of housing justice organizers, political artists, cyber deviants, and brilliant

thinkers, including Ioana Florea, Mișa Dumitriu, Maria Sgarcitu, Ioana Bălănescu,

Nicoleta Visan, Michele Lancione, Manuel Mireanu, Simona Ciotlăuș, Loránd

Szakács, Robi Blaga, Alex Ghiț, Adina Marincea, Beti Pataki, Alex Rațiu, Domnul

Vlad, Silvana Rapeanu, Lavinia Ionescu, Norbert Petrovici, Lolo Maxim, Mădălina

Branduse, Elana Airim, George Zamfir, Paula Duncă, Alex Horghida, Alice Monica

Marinescu, Roland Ibold, Noemi Magyari, Carolina Voizian, David Schwartz,

Alexandru Potocean, Alice Venir, Andrei Șerban, Mihaela Drăgan, Mihai Lucács,

Florentin Dimitriu, Bogdan Tirziu, Mircea Nicolea, Raj-Alexandru Udrea, Iulia

Mocanu, Victor Voizian, Ioana Vlad, Marian Cirpaci, Zsofi Gagyi, and of course,

Ziggy-revoluționară-pisică. But in particular, I am indebted to the collaborative

organizing, comradery, political theorizing, and insight of Veda Popovici, who has

informed this dissertation project in far too many ways to count.

This project would have never amounted to anything without the guidance and

mentorship of my dissertation committee, to whom I will always be grateful. I could

not imagine a more supportive advisor than Neda Atanasoski, whose brilliant

viii

scholarship on postsocialism, technology, and race has influenced my thinking

through each chapter of this dissertation. Karen Barad’s invitation to think temporal

entanglement and Cold War histories has been extremely influential as well, and I am

indebted to her scholarship and thinking throughout this project. This dissertation has

become what is through the generous insight and feedback of Lisa Rofel, whose close

reading of my work, particularly around postsocialism, queerness, and neoliberalism,

has helped me in framing and reframing my interventions and observations. Megan

Moodie has supported this project’s many iterations since the beginning, from our

early readings of Romanian history and to our later more nuanced conversations on

socialist-era informatics. I am also indebted to her pointing me to towards thinking

connectivity and connection as a methodological intervention. Liviu Chelcea has

supported my research in Romania for years now, and his own work on restitution,

gentrification, and zombie socialism in Romania has served as ongoing inspiration.

This project was made possible with funding support from the Fulbright

Institute of International Education, the Social Science Research Council’s

International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Univeristy of California

Humanities Research Insitute, the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, a UC Santa

Cruz Cota Robles fellowship, and more.

In addition, I am indebted to the scholars and faculty who helped guide my

theorization in its earlier stages before beginning fieldwork. Anjali Arondekar’s work

on comparative empires, as well as her guidance archival research, has been

invaluable throughout and after my qualifying exams. Alaina Lemon, who also joined

my qualifying exams committee, has continued to inspire me with her work on anti-

ix

Roma racism, postsocialism, and postsocialist technological and intuitive practices.

Miriam Greenberg has been a constant mentor at UC Santa Cruz, and I look forward

to continuing to work with her on battling gentrification through California and

beyond. Thanks to all the other faculty members in Feminist Studies who have

supported my ongoing research, in particular Neel Ahuja and Felicity Amaya

Schaeffer. I am also grateful for the patience and humor of Suzan Negip-Schatt in my

formative Romanian lessons—mulțumesc frumos!

I might have never found my way into a dissertation project without the

mentorship of Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro throughout the tenure of my MA

in Cultural Anthropology. Together, they taught me that activist-scholarship and

international solidarity was possible, and turned me towards postcolonial scholarship,

feminist anthropology, critical theory, and the work of social justice. I will forever be

grateful for the colleagues that grew out of that space—Heidi Andrea Restrepo

Rhodes, Pei Wu, Katelyn Cabot, Christina Mansfield, Mauro Sifuentes, Alejandro

Uruzzmendi, Fredrick Cloyd, and Tanisha Peyton, to name a few.

This project also came together during the launch of the Radical Housing

Journal, a project which continues to fill me with hope around possibilities of new

international solidarities in fights against techno-imperialism and racial dispossession.

Special thanks to Michele Lancione, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia,

Melissa García-Lamarca, Ana Vilenica, Felicia Berryessa-Erich, and Laura Wynne

for their collaborative work in putting together the journal and the first issue. This has

transpired in parallel with the launch of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

network, led by Ananya Roy. My thinking about geographies of theory and uneven

x

contexts of racial banishment hinges upon her work and mentorship.

New and ongoing mentors, friends and colleagues have continually supported

my thinking throughout this dissertation project. Special thanks to those who helped

me workshop particular chapters here—Luis Felipe Rosado Murillo, Héctor Beltrán,

Sareeta Amrute, Kim Tallbear, Hila Zaban, and Matthew Hayes. And to new

interlocutors who appeared along the way, including Bogdan Popa, Desiree Fields,

Emma Shaw Crane, Jack Gieseking, Sharad Chari, Dillon Mahmoudi, Elvin Wyly,

Daniella Aiello, Sarah Elwood, Denis Woods, Taylor Shelton, Andrada Fiscutean,

Jim Fraser, and Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, as well all those at kollectiv orangotango,

Google ist kein guter Nachbar, the Mapping Action Collective, and more. And of

course, thanks to growing body of Feminist Studies graduate students, all of whom

are part of creating an exciting space of political and critical thinking, as well as to

the wonderful and brilliant undergraduate students who I had the pleasure of teaching.

Thanks to Taylor Ainslie for helping me jump through many administrative hoops.

I am indebted to ongoing support of Lauren Anderson, Jackie Ames, Jordan

Reznick, Marko Muir, Elisa Gill, Eva Mas Silberstein, Shamshir Virk, Lee Entel,

Manissa M. Maharawal, Zoltán Glück, and Carla Wojczuk. Endless gratitude to my

family—Meryl, John, and Jenna—for their ongoing care, along with that from the

whole Brownstein crew—Murray, Hollis, Rick, Arlene, Bradley, Spencer, Emma,

Emily, Charley, Ahkeem, and to Marika, Marc, Naima, and Russel Kaplan. Candace

Roberts has been present from the beginning to the end of this research, and I will

always be grateful for her patience and encouragement along the way.

xi

The text of this dissertation includes partial reprints of the following previously

published material:

Atanasoski, Neda and Erin McElroy. 2018. Postsocialism and the Afterlives of

Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent.” In: Nicoletta Pireddu, ed. Reframing

Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories, 274-297. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The co-author listed in this publication directed and supervised the research which

forms the basis for the dissertation.

The text of this dissertation also includes partial reprints of:

McElroy, Erin. 2018. “Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0.: Algorithms of

Racialized Dispossession.” Social Identities 24(2): 206-221.

McElroy, Erin. 2019. “Data, Dispossession, and Facebook: Techno-Imperialism and

Toponymy in Gentrifying San Francisco.” Urban Geography, DOI:

10.1080/02723638.2019.1591143

McElroy, Erin. “Digital Nomads in Siliconising Cluj: Material and Allegorical

Double Dispossession.” Urban Studies (forthcoming)

McElroy, Erin. “Digital Nomads and Settler Desires: Racial Fantasies of Silicon

Valley Imperialism.” Imaginations (forthcoming)

1

Introduction—Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and

Materialities in Postsocialist Romania

“Is this what it’s really like in Silicon Valley?” my friend asks me, imagining

that the Romanian city of Cluj’s recent rebranding as “the Silicon Valley of Europe”

implies two-way comparativity. Somehow, we’ve managed to find our way inside the

Japanese NTT Data’s new Cluj branch, and feelings of curiosity and clandestineness

have overcome us, even though there’s nothing sneaky about our being inside. NTT

Data, an information technology (IT) firm “nearshoring” an array of software services

and “real-time solutions” with “global delivery capabilities” in forty countries,

acquired Romania’s own EBS software company in 2013. Soon after, it remodeled

the former office, in part paving the way for “urban renewal” of the downtown

Mărăști neighborhood. Flashing a colossal sign godlike upon the techno horizon,

NTT’s interior is replete with fake wall plants, human-shaped robots, and large soft

mushroom statues, all appealing to the astrofuturist science fiction aesthetic of outer

space travel and speculative futures. The fourth floor, home to wEBSiteBistro, is now

opened up to guests, where one can order food and drinks from electronic pads on the

balcony, surrounded by cranes and the echoing sounds of new development. This is

where we are, sitting upon the threshold of Europe’s new Silicon Valley.

Over the last decade, Romania's IT industry has gained international attention,

with the country boasting the continent’s fastest internet and a growth of startups and

firms, particularly in Bucharest and Cluj, but also in cities such as Timișoara, Iași,

and Brașov. Across these cities, technology capital, real estate, and urban politics

2

have been entangling in new ways, often resulting in increased rents around newly

constructed IT office buildings, as well as racial dispossession. As property values

and entrepreneurial culture boom, Roma residents are frequently pushed to peripheral

wastelands, to interstitial spaces squeezed between the urban and rural. At the same

time, anticommunist protests known as the “Light Revolution,” largely designed by

the IT sector, use technology to index Western aspirations and create temporal

distance from Romania’s “dark” socialist past. In doing so, they often fetishize the

pre-socialist interbellum, which in Romania was marked by fascism and eugenics—

other technologies of race and racialization. It was then that Bucharest was

recognized as “the Little Paris of the East,” and Timișoara as “the Little Vienna of the

East.” How do these past moments of aspirational comparativity relate to the updated

“Little Silicon Valley” of today? What other worlds might come into being or become

visible if Silicon Valley ceased being read as the zero point of contemporary analysis,

and if we began instead to read history as connected and accumulative rather than as

just comparative? To address these quesions, in this project, rather than employing a

comparative framework, in which two distinct spaces are compared side by side, I

advocate for connected methods, which foreground entanglements across space and

time.1 My connected approach remains rooted in community organizing, and centers

housing, technological, and cartographic justice as fields of inquiry.

While economists understand the contemporary tech boom to be driving

economic and urban growth in Romania (Colliers International 2018), IT usage and

effects vary dramatically across the country. After all, Romania not only contains one

of the EU’s highest poverty rates, but also fewer IT personnel per total employment

3

than any other European country except Greece, along with a low IT GDP percentage

(Eurostat 2018a; Eurostat 2018b; Eurostat 2018c). Yet in Cluj, IT is the largest

professional sector, driven by global capital and outsourcing, meanwhile fed by

public universities offering a wealth of courses in programming, hardware

development, and more. Most firms are outsourcing ventures, seeking cheap labor,

technological prowess, and a form of “Europeanness” harder to obtain in more

geographically but also culturally distant Global South and East locales.

In Mărăști, but also in Bucharest’s Pipera neighborhood, once home to

socialist era computer development, many IT workers earn up to five times more than

their neighbors (Fiscutean 2014a; Petrovici 2019). Today, these technologists are

enwrapped in contexts of gentrification, much as in California’s own Silicon Valley.

At the same time, Western tech workers, some of whom parade as “digital nomads”

by using anti-Roma racially appropriative language, are landing in Romania,

contributing to contexts of global tech-induced gentrification.

Nevertheless, Romania is clearly not Silicon Valley. Further, this is not the

first time in which the country has experienced a technology boom. Cyber

development was deeply entrenched within the socialist project, while also uniquely

characterizing socialist and postsocialist underground IT practices. While Romania

produced the most third-generation computers in the Eastern bloc during socialism

(1960s and 1970s machines with integrated circuits and miniaturized transistors), it

also hacked Western computer models to produce an array of fourth-generation

microprocessor computers in the 1980s. After socialism, underground practices of

cabling, piracy, and hardware assemblage characterized the transitional period.

4

Siliconization has meant the capitalization of these practices and infrastructure, along

with the cheap labor that nearshoring provides. What does Romania’s current Silicon

Valley status index of its postsocialist present, and what unique IT and property

histories endure, formally and underground?

My friend and I, as members of Căși Sociale Acum (Social Housing Now),

are in the midst of a collective mapping project of Mărăști gentrification, and there is

probably no better place than NTT’s balcony from which to observe the terrain. As

we have been charting, with the Siliconization of the neighborhood, evictions are on

the rise, disproportionately targeting Roma households. In this way, Siliconization

echoes processes of tech-driven racial dispossession in California’s own Silicon

Valley, where technocapitalist growth constitutes and is co-constituted by a form of

racism – one coated in (and coded through) liberalism. In Cluj, or orașul viitorului

(city of the future), socialist-era infrastructure is hollowed and mined to become the

technology of the future. This transpires as Roma residents are displaced, some of

whom end up homeless, racially banished to the city’s waste site, Pata Rât.

Siliconization, in other words, dispels those remaindered by techno-urban

renewal to the wastelands of Western modernization, to interstitial geographies

known as the maidane that border the urban and rural. Just blocks away from NTT,

on Anton Pann Street, a Roma family who had been living there for twenty-two years

was recently evicted. And today, we ran into a Roma couple who will be displaced

later this month. Living upon a crumbling lot without running water or utilities,

squeezed between the new City Casa residential complex and the new German iQuest

campus, they knew that their time was limited as soon as the cranes came in. “All of

5

the space around here is becoming too valuable,” they shrugged on their break from a

job recycling cardboard with a motor-less cart. While socialist urbanization provided

housing and jobs to Roma (many of whom had been living precariously before

socialism began in 1946 due to a longue durée of racism), postsocialist technological

urbanism, or techno-urbanism, restores former racialized property regimes.

This dissertation project focuses upon the fictions and frictions caught up in

postsocialist Siliconization. By fictive, on one hand I allude to the speculative

fantasies and desires entrenched in both socialist and postsocialist technocultures. But

also, I suggest that Romania’s Siliconized status is one of many imagined narratives

that, while partly true, also elides other histories. In this way, my project refers to

imaginaries that the contemporary tech boom is simply a result of what I describe as

Silicon Valley imperialism, or the global condition in which Silicon Valley’s

existence is necessitated by its unending growth, in which, zombie-like, it penetrates

and devours people’s intimate lives and personal data while also consuming global

and even outer space imaginaries in novel ways. It’s true that as an imperial form,

Silicon Valley aims to augment its own reproduction “at home” in California by

instilling new fantasies of “becoming Silicon Valley” upon various terrains. This

occurs in its urban peripheries, for instance, in Oakland, but also globally. Yet

whether in Oakland or in Romania, while Silicon Valley imperialism (or techno-

imperialism for short) is real, so are older histories of racial capitalism and

imperialism, upon which Siliconization rests. Also real are other techno-urban futures

and futures past, unrecognizable to Silicon Valley imperialism. These are often

deleted through Silicon Valley’s attempts to maintain sovereignty. Yet some

6

obstinately remain, rubbing up against and put into friction with Western aspirations,

desires, materialities, and imaginaries (Rofel 2007; Tadiar 2009; Tsing 2005). These

deleted and enduring histories, futures, and futures past, I argue, are requisite in

understanding the contours of the postsocialist present. Their very infrastructures and

visions are enfolded into the Silicon Valley of the East, haunting its real and unreal

present—sometimes overtly, sometimes in back-end code.

Romania, a country that bears long and complex histories of fantasizing the

West, is an apt place from which to study both real and imagined iterations of Silicon

Valley imperialism and its methods of techno-normativity, or the reproduction of

Silicon Valley’s futurity through installations of Western aspirational fantasies.

Techno-normativity erases Romania’s own cyber deviance from historical memory,

installing fantasies of Western recognition. Silicon Valley, as a Cold War construct

exacerbated in post-Cold War times, has not only helped shape the dreams wrapped

up in postsocialist transition, but it has also materially altered the landscape. In doing

so, it instantiates what I describe as racial technocapitalism, an analytic in which, in

order to map racial dispossession amidst technocapitalist geographies, I draw upon

Cedric Robinson’s observation that capitalism has always been co-constituted by

racism, beginning within Europe (1983).

This project engages the twin concepts of racial technocapitalism and Silicon

Valley imperialism to allow for a decentralized analysis of race, space, politics, and

technocultural reproduction. By tracking their entwinement in Romania and Silicon

Valley, I theorize a postsocialist moment. Here I should note that I understand

postsocialism as more than just a historical phase and/or geographic descriptive, but

7

rather as a conceptual frame that denotes both the displacement and enduring

significance of socialism (Atanasoski and Vora 2018; Gille 2010; Popa 2019). In this

way, I read postsocialism as a post-1989 condition that haunts and informs both sides

of the former Iron Curtain despite normative accounts of “the end of history”

(Fukuyama 2006). I also read postsocialism as recoding configurations of race and

empire today (Chari and Verdery 2009). As such, postsocialism, as an analytic, helps

shed light upon novel shifts and obfuscations between public and private realms,

neo/liberalism and illiberalism, and global race/space and its unevenness (Horvat and

Štiks 2015; Moodie and Rofel forthcoming). It also points to how socialist

institutionalized practices and visions survived the end of state socialism, and how

they endure alongside both end-of-history revisionist narratives and socialist nostalgia

(Rofel and Yanagisako 2019; Yurchak 2013). Yet postsocialism additionally

highlights utopian futures past and present, many of which involve technology and

infrastructure (Buck-Morss 2002; Chelcea and Pulay 2015; Collier 2011; Kurtović

and Sargsyan 2019; Murawski 2019).

Throughout this project, I analyze three phenomena unique to Romania’s

relationship with Silicon Valley imperial circuits: entanglements of technology, race,

and urban lifeworlds; socialist and Cold War techno histories as they inform those of

the postsocialist/post-Cold War present; and the entwining of Silicon Valley and

Romanian IT imaginaries and materialities. In doing so, while wary of Silicon Valley

analytic hegemony in studies of technoculture, I remain curious about the local

frictions that transpire when Silicon Valley culture brushes up against that of

Romania in both expected and unexpected ways. For instance, even during socialism,

8

Romania maintained numerous technological trade agreements with Western

countries and the UN, unlike its neighbors. And today, regardless of ongoing paranoia

about human informants lurking in the midst, and despite ongoing reporting of

deviant activities to the Romanian Intelligence Services (the postsocialist specter of

the socialist-era notorious Securitate), there is little regard for the impact of data

colonialism on people’s everyday lives. How can the layering of two very different

surveillance regimes from opposite sides of the Silicon/Iron Curtain be understood as

constitutive of the postsocialist technological present? How does postsocialist theory

help us understand such configurations while also queering techno-normative

approaches of materializing Siliconized futurity? After all, techno-normative

reproduction is only one of many means of crafting techno-future possibilities. How

do postsocialist analytics point to other futures past and present unarrested by

technocapitalist dreams and desires?

This project is based upon ethnographic work in the Romanian cities of

Bucharest and Cluj, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. I

also briefly visit the Romanian city of Râmnicu Vâlcea and the Moldovan city of

Chişinău. Unbecoming Silicon Valley emerges from reading and, at times co-

producing, technology, maps, speculative fiction, infrastructure, and archival work.

By doing so, it traces shifting relationships to technological futurity, race, and space. I

ask what Romania's current Silicon Valley status indexes of its postsocialist present,

and what unique IT and property histories endure, formally and underground. By

focusing upon how techno-urban growth is differentially understood according to

race/ethnicity, class, and generation, I map the uneven postsocialist spacetime of

9

racial technocapitalism and Silicon Valley imperialism alike.

In what follows, I question why technology in Romania and postsocialist

space has been so central to understandings of progress, be they of socialist modernity

or transition to liberal democracy. Put differently, what does technology have to do

with socialism, the Cold War, and their intersecting “posts”? In the spacetime of

Siliconized Romania, both totalizing and localizing narratives fall short when

constructed in isolation. Analysis thus necessitates a transnational approach, coupled

with deep ethnographic engagement and interdisciplinary reading practices.

Racial Technocapitalism

In California’s own Silicon Valley and its urban peripheries, technocapitalism

has long induced contexts of racial dispossession as Black and Latinx residents are

disproportionately displaced to pave way for a largely young, white, wealthy, and

male IT workforce (McElroy 2019; Mirabal 2009). Might it be that Siliconization

inheres contexts of racial dispossession by accumulating momentum and geography?

This is what my friend and I ask ourselves upon NTT’s balcony as we attempted to

map what Ananya Roy describes as contexts of “racial banishment,” or the expelling

of subaltern communities to the far edges of urban life (2017), in this case, to the

wastelands, or the maidane. But there, sitting upon the oraşul viitorului, we find

ourselves growing suspect of a form of comparativity that sees Romanian cities as

Silicon Valley rather than as non-fungible techno spaces in and of themselves. As I

suggest, while Silicon Valley imperialism does indeed transmit new forms of racial

technocapitalism, by simply understanding Siliconized Cluj as such, unique techno

10

histories are torn from the palimpsest that is postsocialist Romania. These histories

have everything to do with the intertwinement of technology, space, and race in the

specific histories of Romania, and Romania’s unique historical transnational

engagements.

As such, and as I further elaborate upon in Chapter 1, my approach to

gentrification studies here diverges from those who center Western cities as models

for comparativity (Atkinson and Bridge 2005), as well as those that privilege class

over race in assessing the causes and effects of dispossession (Lopes-Morales 2016;

Slater 2017; Walker 2018). Instead, my approach aligns with scholarship coming out

of critical race studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies that necessitates

theorizing race and its transnational transits (McKittrick 2006; Lowe 2015; Roy 2014;

Silva 2007). This approach attends to the violence of technocapitalism, yet

understands that race is not simply subordinate to, but rather co-constitutive of,

technocapitalism’s ability to transform space.

Gentrification in Romanian cities functions in part by restoring pre-socialist

understandings of racialized space through practices of property restitution

“transitional justice” mechanisms, in which pre-socialist property is returned to the

heirs of former owners (Chelcea 2012). Due to a long accumulation of racism in

Romania, few Roma were pre-socialist property owners, and thus very few are able to

claim restitution rights (Achim 2004; Petrovici et al. 2019). Not only did many Roma

workers lose employment after 1989 as factories became privatized, but many lost

their homes. And yet, restitution in Romania is coded through the liberal language of

transitional justice and heritage (Florea 2016), signaling who is and who is not

11

designated as human upon postsocialist geographies of rights (Atanasoski 2013;

Lemon 2018; Yoneyama 2016). This language also reflects what Liviu Chelcea and

Oana Druță describe as “zombie socialism” (2016), or the anticommunist discourse

that, in valorizing neoliberal futurity, pathologizes socialism as a dark and deadened

aberration to be overcome. In this way, the socialist period becomes conflated with

the fascist one that preceded it. Yet for numerous poor and racialized residents,

socialism offered employment and housing for the first time in national history—

provisions that evaporated with postsocialist transition. Indeed, long before its more

Stalinist turn, socialism in Romania emerged in response to fascism. In exploring the

various housing injustices that transition has concretized, I align this project with that

of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities network, which prioritizes housing justice

rather than gentrification as a field of inquiry.2 To this, I add technology justice as a

supplemental field, one that doesn’t conflate all technology into the domain of

imperialism, and that rather understands technological justices of the past and present

as real.

To understand zombie socialism upon racialized technospace, a postsocialist

analytic approach is requisite. As Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue,

postsocialism, as an analytic, needs to become less simply a description of time and

space and more a mode of theoretical engagement (2018). After all, why should

postcolonial studies so often do the theoretical heavy lifting, with postsocialism

relegated to geographic and temporal descriptives? Because technology was such a

central component of state socialism and the Cold War (Beller 2018; Buck-Morss

2002), and because, as scholars of postsocialism have argued, both projects endure

12

(Dzenovska and Kurtović 2016; Rofel 2019; Scott 2013; Yurchak 2017), postsocialist

theoretical work might attend to technological geopolitics, cultures, and

infrastructures as they existed during socialism and transformed after 1989. As Joseph

Masco observes, in post-Cold War times, much of the world remains scrambled upon

a “utopian-apocalyptic circuit board” (2016), shaping understandings of technology,

utopia, and deviance. For instance, while Russian and Romanian “illiberal” hackers

have been framed as guilty by US liberal pundits for having “hacked” US democracy,

inciting the “postliberal” dawn of Donald Trump, it has since been revealed (via the

2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal) that Silicon Valley practices of data colonization,

algorithmic governance, and Big Data may be more at fault. While I study this

phenomenon in more detail in Chapter 4, its complexity illuminates the more general

need to maintain a postsocialist approach in analyzing Silicon Valley and Eastern

Europe entanglement. Such an approach is aligned with Sharad Chari and Katherine

Verdery’s call for “post-Cold War ethnographic” practices (2009), or ethnographic

work that foregrounds the connections and discontinuities between Cold War and

post-Cold War imperial forms and racial technologies.

Since the emergence of the Trump era, liberal pundits in the US have been

blaming illiberal Eastern European and Russian hackers for Trump’s victory.

Borrowing Cold War grammars and projecting neo-McCarthyistic hysteria, US liberal

media has used this to pin down their case against Trump. Of course, Trump has also

been waging his own war on socialism, which crumbles these contradictory

alignments. And, the Russian oligarchs with whom he has colluded are wealthy

because they capitalized upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. This sheds light upon

13

an epistemological impasse brought on by the Cold War paradigm—that is, the

positing of liberalism and illiberalism as opposites in the political-ideological

spectrum. This Cold War opposition once mapped the so-called free and unfree

worlds. Yet by continued reliance upon it today, we fail to understand how this map

enables fascism to grow. I map this out in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, looking to the rise of

fascist dreams in California’s own Silicon Valley, as well as to popular protest culture

and techno-urban development projects in Romania. As I observe, in the heart of the

post-Cold War (today’s Silicon Valley), fascist “alt-right” ideologies such as the

“Dark Enlightenment” accumulate,3 recoding past eugenicist aspirations. Meanwhile,

fascist imaginaries of the pre-socialist era are reinterpreted in postsocialist Romania

in order to pathologize the “darkness” of socialist technology and urbanism. Today,

on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, fascist futures differentially yet connectedly

entwine with technofuturist visions, informing what might be described as

technofascism.

How might postsocialism, as an analytic, help map the updating of pre-

socialist fascist imaginaries on both sides of the former Iron Curtain? How can

postsocialist conceptual frameworks help us understand the connections between

fascism, imperialism, and their technological reinterpretations? During the time in

which state socialism was solidifying across the Eastern bloc, both Hannah Arendt

(1971) and Karl Polanyi (2001) studied connections between liberal democracy and

fascism. They each, in different ways, suggest that fascism (particularly Nazism),

emerged out of crises in liberal empires. Arendt maps a Nazi genealogy rooted in the

late-19th century German colonial expansion and genocide in Namibia. Nazism,

14

located within Western history, after all espoused the acquisition of “vital space,” an

imperial project funded through “race thinking.” Meanwhile, Polanyi sees the 1930s

rise of fascism as an effect of state-enforced laissez-faire and self-regulating market

economies. These markets, left unhindered, could not but help produce colonial

domination, he suggests.

Nikhil Pal Singh argues that although these two thinkers offer a great deal to

studies that connect liberalism, imperialism, racism, and fascism, they both failed to

fully understand the raciality of US liberalism, as well as its implications in Cold War

socialist space (2017, 111-113). As he also points out, Arendt’s critique of Stalinist

totalitarianism and German Nazism have too easily merged in popular interpretations,

leading to conflations of fascism and socialism (a reification that endures in liberal

imaginaries on both sides of the former Iron Curtain). Yet it was anticommunism that

enabled the US to globally extend “Manifest Destiny” during the Cold War, under the

aegis of “containing” Communism. This endures following the Cold War, updated in

the Cold War 2.0. How can one understand this expansionism in connection to the

fascist mode that preceded it, particularly as the former reproduces contexts of racist

genocide, deportations, incarceration, and more?

Postsocialist analytics, I suggest, help illuminate how both liberalism and

fascism have historically relied upon imperialism. Post-Cold War Silicon Valley

imperialism builds upon prior imperial iterations, mobilizing liberalism in the name

of containing illiberalism. At the same time, it allows racial technocapitalism to grow

unhindered. In its bolder moments, the merging of these twin concepts—Silicon

Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism—spawn the possibilities of

15

technofascism. Today, as the West looks toward the East for illiberal prefiguration, it

is imperative to look at the conditions than enable fascism (imperialism and racism)

rather than fall into the ahistorical trap that understands fascism as endemic to

socialist Eastern Europe. And in Eastern Europe, if the liberal fantasy of

technocapitalism liberates nothing except technofascism, perhaps it is time to imagine

other technological futures. In this way, Romania might be a better space from which

to theorize the perils of liberalism rather than illiberalism. At the same time, Silicon

Valley remains an apt space from which to theorize the raciality of technocapitalism

and imperialism alike.

While absorbing technological histories and infrastructure of the socialist

period, and while bolstering the restoration of pre-socialist property regimes as part of

a broader urban renewal process, racial technocapitalism in Romania also preys upon

the linguistic prowess of Romanian workers. As I have heard recounted numerous

times, the only real requirement for IT call center work is English fluency. NTT, for

instance, boasts 100 percent English fluency (NTT 2018). This fluency can be traced

back to socialist and transitional histories. During socialism, people were mostly

restricted to watching only one television station. But eager for more, people began

illegally streaming neighboring countries’ channels, learning foreign languages, from

Bulgarian to Serbian. After 1989, Western programming flooded the channels, and

people, already accustomed to learning language through TV, quickly mastered

English. “Now they teach English to all the kids at school,” a colleague observed,

“but our generation, we learned from the Cartoon Network.” A former call-center

worker in Bucharest mentioned that it was by watching US television that she learned

16

how to smile like an American and feign a US genre of enthusiasm, one largely

absented from service work in Romania but necessary for outsourced labor (cf.

Hochschild 2012). She worked for a US company for two years, where she was

forced smile even while writing emails to clients “who could tell.” Meanwhile, those

with coding skills are praised by their employers for “being so damn good at

programming,” one friend in Timișoara working for a small Seattle-based startup told

me. But he is only paid a small portion of what his US contemporaries are. “It’s

beyond patronizing,” he shrugged. Yet his colleagues herald Western companies as

salvific, he told me over a beer after work one evening in a bar that would soon be

shut down in the gentrifying neighborhood. But why is it that there is such

technological prowess in Romania to begin with?

Unbeknownst to many promulgators of Siliconization, Romania excelled in

hardware production during socialism. In part this was due to the country’s own

maverick status in the Soviet-led satellite state trade agreement, Comecon (Mureșan

2008). Though Romania was slated to specialize in agriculture, the Communist Party

dreamt of other futures, ones involving industrialization, urbanization, and

informatics. Vasile Baltac, who had been a key researcher in the state’s first computer

projects, and who rose to become Minister of Machine Tools, Electrotechnics, and the

Electronics Industry in the 1980s, today leads a software company in the same office

in which he worked during socialism. As he recounted one morning to me in the tall

and relatively narrow brick building in Bucharest’s Pipera neighborhood, surrounded

by photographs of early MECIPT-2 computer teams from the 1960s, socialist

Romania invested heavily in computer production. Soon it began selling machines to

17

China and the Middle East. University informatics, physics, and cybernetics research

centers were highly valorized by the regime, and there was far more gender equality

then than in the Siliconized worlds of today, he added. By the end of socialism,

Romania had produced more than twenty-five computer models, from the Felix in

Bucharest to the TMS in Timișoara. As other programmers have reminisced, the

national radio station even broadcast raw code after midnight on Thursdays so that

emergent programmers could tape it and then spend the week decoding it. “Mostly it

was just airplane schedules, or information about the weather, but still, it taught us a

lot,” my friend’s brother recalled, with a large grin across his face.

After 1989, the land that factories (computer and otherwise) sat upon was

bought by real estate speculators, divided into joint stock trades, and sold. Western

firms such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and Oracle swept in to absorb former

IT workers. In Cluj, the production of HC386 computers was halted, and “everything

just shut down,” Bogdan Tirziu, a self-taught programmer and retro-computing

enthusiast, explained one rainy day over drinks. There are only four of HC386s left in

the country today. Bogdan is trying to implement a local computer museum in Cluj,

but he has gotten no support from the City Hall. Official computer memory, it seems,

has become devoured by zombie socialism as well. But Bogdan offers another insight

useful in theorizing the entwining of Siliconization and zombie socialism in Cluj.

“Contrary to what people think, the tech boom is not being led by firms, but by a

particular generation of people, now in their mid-30s.” This “Xennial” generation,

occupying that interstitial space between Gen X and Millennials, correlates with what

Bogdan describes as the “X86 Generation,” a reference to Intel’s x86 microprocessor

18

architecture.

Conceived of in Cold War Silicon Valley in 1978, the x86 microprocessor has

since embodied numerous iterations, and still dominates desktop and mobile

technology. While in the West, Xennials are defined as being born pre-digital, but

easily adapting to digitization in the 1990s. But in postsocialist Romania, most

Xennials were not able to afford Silicon Valley technology, despite the growing

prevalence of Western firms and products. Instead, this generation had to learn how

to create its own hardware and infrastructure, often by adapting and hacking existing

models. By reading computer magazines and by hanging out at internet cafes, Bogdan

learned how to create his own internet network, and soon connected twenty-four

people in his block. “It’s really people in this generation that are creating all of the

software and systems that the West wants today,” he tells me. Unlike Millennials,

who grew upon digital technology platforms, the Xennials had to make the leap from

analogue to digital. In Romania, it was the perfect combination of socialist IT

continuity, socialist and postsocialist austerity, and Xennial temporal placement that

concretized the foundation that the West entered to exploit.

While Bogdan became a retrocomputing expert and while some of his peers

became software programmers, others became hackers—people now pathologized by

the West as dangerous and illiberal, threatening to destroy US democracy. As such,

we can understand racial technocapitalism as a multifaceted process that stabilizes

pre-socialist racial configurations while at the same racializing the socialist period

and its continuities. In other words, while Roma continue to be racialized in Romania

and made subjects of internal (and also external) racism, racial technocapitalism also

19

functions by racializing the space of Romania as technologically backwards and

retrograde. This process does not affect all lifeworlds in Romania evenly—far from it.

But it does result in the ruination of numerous lives, objects, and futures.

Silicon Valley Imperialism

Gentrification in Romanian cities is not the fault of socialist and transitional

technological development, nor that of the X86 Generation, though it does capitalize

upon transitional histories and socialist remains. Gentrification is also a result of other

times and racial configurations, some of which predate the very transformation of

Silicon Valley from the orchard capital of California to the suburbanized land of

Silicon chips. Perhaps gentrification in postsocialist techno-urban space might best be

understood as a complex process in which Western firms prey upon: 1) a unique

layering of socialist and transitional technological histories; and 2) postsocialist

urbanizing processes that restore pre-socialist racialized property relationships.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley is not an innocent player. In attempting to reproduce

itself elsewhere, Fukuyama’s “end of history” predictions gain strength.

Although past technological and urban history is sometimes hidden in IT

infrastructure and imaginaries, sometimes it stands out overtly. While NTT absorbed

EBS, even maintaining the CEO of the former company, much of the surrounding

“chic modernist” development builds upon former industrial and residential spaces.

The German iQuest campus sits upon the ruins of the Flacăra textile factory on

Someșului Street, near to where the also German Bosch is developing a new campus.

The canteen of the former factory now houses firms with abstruse names such as

20

Doc.Essensis and CCSCC. One block down, the old Napochim plastics factory

((known as “The Red Flag” when it first opened in 1947) and the former Arbator

butchery are being transformed into a new apartment block and into the “Oxygen

Mall” respectively. Still on NTT’s balcony, my friend and I laugh, “See, it’s not the

greenwashing of postsocialism—it’s the oxygen-washing!” This oxygen-washing, or

the covering up of and parasiting off of socialist-era urban infrastructure—while

simultaneously instilling new racial meanings of space and future—is precisely what

I mean by Silicon Valley imperialism.

Silicon Valley does indeed imagine itself as imperial, and in doing so, it

shapes and reshapes understandings of progress, from within its California imperial

hub to understandings of progress in Western and Eastern Europe alike and beyond.

Silicon Valley contains more billionaires per square foot anywhere else on earth,

more patents than anywhere else in the US, more venture capitalists than anywhere

else globally, and three of the world’s largest companies—Google, Apple, and

Facebook. Most devices of networked life and the smart city run on networks

constructed by Silicon Valley companies. As Richard Walker writes, “the mythology

of the plucky tech entrepreneur has diffused around the world, becoming a key

element in the capitalist dream world of today” (2018, 7). This dream is alive and

well in Bucharest and Cluj, where Western entrepreneurs offer workshops, TED talks,

and more around the clock on how to become better at capitalism, how to

successfully amass Big Data and mobilize artificial intelligence (AI), or how to

successfully pitch one’s startup to a Silicon Valley funder. Significantly, Silicon

Valley emerged as the center of global technocapital during the Cold War (O’Mara

21

2015); its position has only enhanced afterwards in post-Cold War times, stabilizing

its cultural, political, and economic centrality. This stabilization also facilitates the

epistemological erasure of other technological futures, past and present, deleting

routes that fail to appear on Google Maps. But how to map this?—my friend and I

wonder, still sitting upon NTT’s balcony.

There, blankly staring out at new construction surrounding us, my friend,

older than I, begins to remember the thrill that she had as a child in the 1970s, when

the nearby Central Commercial Center opened its doors to the public for the first

time. Today, the top floor of the building has been transformed into ClujHub, a

coworking space with daily talks in which successful Westerners attempt local

entrepreneurial inculcation. It also houses Uber, much to the chagrin of local taxi

drivers, many of whom are Roma and who have been engaged in protests against the

California-based “unicorn” startup. Recounting her first visit to the very same space

with her mother, my friend pauses, questioning if that not-so-distant memory mirrors

that of NTT opening its cosmological fourth floor up to us today. How much does

contemporary change rest upon socialist times, when industrialization, urbanization,

and also informatics became central priorities of the regime? “Is the contemporary

landscape more like 1970s urbanism, or more like contemporary Siliconization

elsewhere?” we wonder. How does one reconcile the reality of multiple origin points

and non-linear entanglements?

While remaining critical of Silicon Valley’s imposition as the Greenwich

Mean Time for all technofuturist imaginaries, and of its tendency to clone contexts of

racial banishment abroad, perhaps more generative understandings of local techno-

22

urbanism might emerge through analytic decentralization (Amrute 2016; Chan 2013;

Ouředníček 2016; Rai 2019). After all, the Siliconization of Cluj does not simply

reproduce technocultural dynamics upon a tablă ştearsă (tabula rasa). On the

contrary, it lands upon the infrastructure of former plants, many of which were part of

socialist modernity’s own project of techno-urbanism—an endeavor aimed at

implementing class equality, national autonomy, and urbanization. Siliconization

rests upon these histories and their infrastructures, while also entwining with post-

1989 infrastructural processes of racialized restitution and privatization.

Not only is it important to study technocultures urban lifeworlds often

overlooked in Silicon Valley imposition and comparativity alike, but it is also

necessary to read technological modernity from the perspective of those who lived

through the demise of socialism in their countries (Chari and Verdery 2009;

Petrovzsky and Țichindeleanu 2011). In her monograph on Cold War and post-Cold

War technologies of communication, Alaina Lemon observes that there has been far

more curiosity amongst Russians about US culture and technology than the other way

around, while US proponents of liberal democracy grow increasingly squeamish of its

Cold War counterpart (2018). Indeed, ethnographies of Cold War technology have

been either overly US-centric, or disproportionately focused upon Soviet and US

antipodes and their “flashy flagships” of the US/USSR space race and nuclear

armament (Hecht 2011, 2). In contrast, while I theorize Siliconization and technology

from the space of Romania, I also theorize Silicon Valley through postsocialist

analytics. This decenters the West and the Soviet Union from studies of socialism, but

also brings the West into conversations on postsocialism, where it is often vacant.

23

Silicon Valley imperialism can be onto-epistemological in nature (Barad

2003), or, as some of my friends in Romania describe, self-colonizing. Gentrification,

as both a popular understanding of urban change, but also an analytic, can mean

deleting socialist techno-urban histories and the politics that informed them, eliding

their entanglement with the present. In this way, by reading postsocialist urban

transformation simply as a result of gentrification, technological pasts and presents

become gentrified. This paves way for the heralding of Western firms such as Google

and IBM, both of which sponsored Bucharest’s most recent LGBT Pride, much to the

chagrin of leftist queer organizers. Thus, gentrification, as an analytic, can mean

imposing Silicon Valley comparativity as mode of framing the present, while also

assuming the West as the center of technological and geopolitical knowledge

production. What other futures past and present might emerge by reading the techno-

urban present through other fields of inquiry, from that of housing to that of

technological justice?

Queering Postsocialism, Corrupting Techno-Normativity

Silicon Valley imperialism functions through the expansion of techno-

normativity, reproducing its own future by penetrating formerly impenetrable space,

from intimate bodies to outer space to postsocialist geographies. In Romania, techno-

normativity instills techno-imperial understandings of progress, deleting what might

be rendered queer, corrupt, and illiberal cyberculture from Romania’s socialist and

transitional past. In doing so, it draws upon Elizabeth Freeman’s “chrono-

normativity,” or the use of time to meld human bodies into maximum productivity

24

(2010), while also inculcating “illiberal” geopolitical spaces and cultures with desires

of becoming chrono-normative. Techno-normativity thereby facilitates the

penetration of Silicon Valley technologies, practices of AI, and data colonization.

Indeed, Silicon Valley imperialism and zombie socialism are techno-

normative in their temporal framing, and by queering postsocialism, other

technological futures come into play. Queering in this sense looks to socialist-era

transitional technological practices, some of which endure below the surface of both

the state and Silicon Valley imperialism. In this way, queering postsocialism

provincializes techno-normativity and techno-imperialism. Methodologically,

queering unearths antiracist and anti-capitalist techno futures past, some of which

materialized, some of which are still being dreamt.

By queering, and aligned with queer theory, here I diverge from reading

queerness as a simple identarian code or sexuality descriptive, but rather, in the words

of Ronak Kapadia, “as a critical set of interpretive strategies that makes possible the

production of alternative knowledges, affects, and affiliations” (2014, 230). He goes

on to describe what he calls “queer cartographic critique,” or a mode of inquiry that

maps “how knowledge is secured under the conditions of late modern imperialism,

but also prioritizes the affective, sensorial, and everyday visions, sounds, and

practices of diasporic and minoritarian life” (ibid., 230). As a methodological antidote

to what Ella Shohat diagnoses as the “disciplinary and conceptual boundaries that

continue to quarantine interconnected fields of inquiry” queer cartographic technique

places “often ghettoized histories, geographies, and discourses in politically and

epistemologically synergetic relation” (Kapadia 2014, 229; Shohat 2006, 15). Here I

25

want to expand upon Kapadia’s antidote in order to connect postsocialist with queer

understandings of Silicon techno-normativity.

By queering techno-normalization, one also ends up corrupting postsocialist

understandings of temporality. While anticommunists in Romania and in the US

frequently pathologize socialism and its endurance as “corrupt,” here I question how

we can queer the concept of corruption (without also undermining legitimate

concerns of neoliberal violence post-1989). Queering and corrupting here thus look to

techno-utopic futures past and futures yet-to-come, those coded as excess in both

state socialist and postsocialist techno-imperial understandings of futurity (Popa

2019). In this way, I understand queerness as engaging with desires for futures

unrecognizable by the state (whether socialist or not), and unreadable through Google

glass. In other words, queerness does not align itself with state socialism, but it does

question the pathologization of anti-capitalism in the postsocialist Siliconized present.

It finds alignment with queer of color critique (Hong and Ferguson 2011; Ferguson

2004; Muñoz 1999), in that it understands emancipatory antiracist and queer

postsocialist futures as inextricably entangled. It also finds connection and intimacy

in projects of non-alignment, be they of international solidarities past or present.

Queering postsocialism thereby involves studying technologies of prior times,

not for the sake of recuperation, but rather, in the words of Carolyn Dinshaw, to

“touch the past” (2006), or to “touch across time” (2001, 203). While this allows the

exploring of what Jonathan Flatley describes as the “dead ends and detours we might

share with those who came before us” (2008, 7), it also recognizes that the corrupt

past is not fully dead. Like that application icon you dragged into your computer’s

26

trash bin forgetting that the icon is only one many files having to do with an

application’s programming, there are uncounted bytes hiding on your aesthetically

new (but infrastructurally entangled-with-the-past) machine. Queering postsocialism

thus engages with practices of memory. Karen Barad suggests, “Remembering is not

a process of recollection, of the reproduction of what was, of assembling and ordering

events like puzzle pieces fit together by fixing where each has its place. Rather, it is a

matter of re-membering, of tracing entanglements, responding to yearnings for

connection, materialized into fields of longing/belonging, of regenerating what never

was but might yet have been” (2015, 406-407). But what if the materials of this re-

membering are rendered contaminant, corrupt, and black? In this case, touching the

past becomes a queer act in and of itself. In what follows, I engage in queering

postsocialism by scavenging through the corrupt past, digging out dismembered

computer parts, salvaging discarded IT magazines, hacking together futures past and

futures yet to come unrecognizable to, and yet beyond intimate with, Silicon Valley

imperialism.

Today, Western tech companies with branches in Romania have followed

trends emergent in San Francisco to pinkwash queer justice work (cf. Stanley 2018).

Pride parades marinate with Google balloons, while Ikea billboards welcome queer

consumers into their calculations of capital accumulation. For Google, this means

rendering Silicon Valley as the future of liberal inclusivity, aligned with what Jodi

Melamed describes as racial liberalism, or a post-Second World War set of Western

strategies for managing the racial contradictions that antiracist and anticolonial

movements exposed. As she writes, “In contrast to white supremacy, the liberal race

27

paradigm recognizes racial inequality as a problem, and it secures a liberal symbolic

framework for race reform centered in abstract equality, market individualism, and

inclusive civic nationalism” (2006, 1). In this way, antiracism and homonormativity

have become absorbed into US capitalism, with racial liberalism providing its logics.

Silicon Valley imperialism updates this imperial technique by adapting what

Atanasoski and Vora describes as “technoliberalism,” in which “technology advances

humans towards a postracial future by asserting a post-labor world in which racial

difference, along with all human social difference, is transcended” (2019, 2). And yet,

postracial futures continue to instill racism and hetero/homonormativity, temporally

reliant upon the reproduction of racial technocapitalism and Silicon Valley

imperialism.

David Scott argues that temporal experience is always discursively rendered

through fictive models that connect beginnings, middles, and endings, along with

pasts, presents, and futures (2015, 70). Both underground and official technological

projects of the socialist era, particularly in the realm of cybernetics, informatics, and

computation, had different temporal imaginaries than those of Silicon Valley, state

socialism’s technological counterpart. There were different futures at stake. While the

project of transition into the end of history sought to obviate technological difference

and homogenize techno imaginaries into Cold War Silicon models, the end of history

has yet to arrive. Underground practices of cyber deviance continued to flourish in

Romania in the 1990s and 2000s, from DIY cabling practices connecting

neighborhood blocs to cities such as Râmnicu Vâlcea, known as “Hackerville” by the

West, seeping with illiberal, corrupt threat. Today, despite Siliconized narratives that

28

gentrify socialist and transitional underground techno-urban pasts with totalizing

explanatories of top-down globalization, other techno histories queer the wires of the

Siliconized present. These, like “leftovers from a former future stranded in the

present” (Scott 2015, 5), corrupt Silicon Valley imperial time, or postsocialist

common time.

As Anita Starosta suggests, the forging of this common time transpires

through the act of translation, or “a process of a never-finished synchronization

among multiple temporalities—and, by the same token, the process of forging the

only possible authentic ‘we’” (2014, 2005). And yet, as she marks, translational is

never a fully finished process, and that due “perverse tongues,” the common “we” of

postsocialism is never fully concretized. These perverse tongues queer the locution of

the socialist past and its endurance. Queering thus means reading socialist and

transitional pasts, rendered corrupt, as simultaneously touching, bolstering, and

corrupting what is articulated as the Siliconization of Romania. Siliconization, like

the common time of history’s end, can thus be read as a heteronormative event, one

that reproduces teleological dreams of Western becoming in ways that fuel the labor

and resource needs of the West. One that becomes corrupted by coding technologic

presents as inextricably entangled with socialist histories. Atanasoski and Vora offer,

“Postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order

even as its revolutionary antithesis” (2018, 141). Continuing, “Resisting the

revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work

through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present” (ibid., 141). As I question here,

in Romanian techno space, what are these legacies, and how do they queerly corrupt

29

Silicon Valley techno-normativity? How can queering refuse the resurrection of state

socialism, instead offering a framework through which one can read deviant techno-

entanglements of the present?

Degentrifying Gentrification Studies

Just as Silicon Valley dominates geographic and epistemological centrality in

conversations on technology and technoculture, Western cities and their processes

have long taken the center stage in gentrification debates. These understand

contemporary Western urban trajectories as auguring non-Western futures. This is

particularly evident in Bucharest and Cluj, with primary-colored Google balloons and

neon astrofuturist signage holding the urban horizon in place. But these processes

also invoke the pre-socialist era, a time in which Bucharest was described as “the

Little Paris of the East.” Not coincidentally, this was also a time of extreme fascism,

marked by the attempted elimination of Roma and Jews. While fantasies of becoming

Western go back to the Enlightenment in Romania, and as state socialism itself can be

understood a post-enlightenment trajectory (Buck-Morss 2002), fantasies of

Westernization uniquely bracket the socialist period, invoking multitemporal

bidirectional spacetime travel fantasies of becoming Western and White. It is in part

because of this that Liviu Chelcea suggests that to understand gentrification in

Eastern European cities, scholarship needs both be more attentive to issues of

displacement, and to issues of time and space (2017). Here, I attempt to be more

attentive to all, diverging from, yet nevertheless conversing with, debates emergent in

comparative urbanism. These debates question whether or not gentrification has

30

“gone global,” and if comparativity imposes Western theories into Global South and

East locales (Ghertner 2015; Maloutas 2012; Ouředníček 2016; Roy 2017; Shin,

Lees, and López-Morales 2016).

While there are good points to be made as to the problematics of, as Matthias

Bernt articulates, both universalizing and individualizing comparisons in these

debates (2016, 643), importantly they have been ongoing for some time in

postcolonial studies, anthropology, and comparative literature (Appadurai 2000;

Chakravarty 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Lowe 2015; Rofel 1999; Spivak

1988; Tsing 2000). While it is promising that these conversations now too in media

res in urban studies, with scholars such as Asher Ghertner suggesting that

gentrification, as an analytic, may not apply in “much of the world” (2015), there may

be much to learn from other fields that long reworked comparativity. For instance, in

Sanjay Subrahmanyam observes that comparative approaches to traditional area

studies might force false reductions, and that perhaps rather a connected approach

might be more useful in understanding spatial tethering and transactions (1997, 745).

A connected approach to reading techno-urban change and their accompanying

desires in Romania foregrounds its current multitemporal racial conjuncture. As

Barad studies, past moments are always enfolded into the present, so that any moment

in time is haunted by, and entangled with, futures past (2017). This also aligns with

Marilyn Strathern’s insights on partial connections (2004). Further, as Bernt observes,

comparative urban studies debates are often stymied by the theoretical foundations of

gentrification research; other fields need to come into the fore if such debates are to

be advanced (2016, 643). More specifically, Roy (2017) argues that urban studies too

31

often elide deep histories of racial disposability that contemporary neoliberalism rests

upon, and that engagement with other disciplines is requisite in understanding

processes such as racial banishment.

As such, to degentrify gentrification theory from the ground up, one must

foreground unique configurations of temporality entangled in postsocialist cityscapes

not necessarily familiar in the field of urban studies. Critical race studies, postsocialist

studies, and postcolonial studies are particularly useful in examining imaginaries of a

return to pre-socialist racial property regimes—processes of ridding postsocialist

cities of their “subhuman” inhabitants. These fields are also useful in reading

fantasies that see Silicon Valley as liberating postsocialist time from the darkness of

socialism. While there is much to learn from those mired in leftover time, or the

lifeworlds rendered surplus in neoliberal calculi of Western liberal becoming, there is

also much to learn from the very idea of time travel itself and the post-Enlightenment

dreams it promises. These dreams are founded upon what Sylvia Wynter defines as an

incorporative logic of becoming “Man,” or the white human of Western modernity

(2003). To become Man, one must continually reincorporate a set of master codes

about who does and who does not constitute the proper subject of the future,

substituting one set of codes for another to maintain human verses non-human grids

of intelligibility.

In postsocialist times, liberalism codes socialism and its afterlives as non-

human. In Siliconized contexts, this coding can be understood as what Neferti Tadiar

describes as metropolitanist processes of “uber-urbanization,” in which “intermittent

detours into leftover spaces, where the pools and eddies of excess life-times—the life-

32

times of the urban excess—collect” (2016, 57-58). These pools, these “remaindered

life-times,” exist beyond the pale of social reproduction. They “consist of a diverse

array of acts, capacities, associations, aspirations in practice, experiential modes, and

sensibilities that people engage in, draw upon, and invent in the struggle to make and

remake social life under conditions of their own superfluity or disposability” (Tadiar

2013, 23). In doing so, these lifetimes disrupt the presumed end of history, rendering

the triumph of Western globality merely fiction.

While urban studies literature is not known for its investigations of time

travel, nor its explorations of racial capitalism for that matter, there are important

interventions that postsocialist urban studies does make. Urban studies was, after all,

revitalized in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War to better theorize the

newly accessible “world of cities” (Robinson 2002), many of which were

transforming through new injections of neoliberal democracy. But through this, a

dominant analytic emerged, one that understands postsocialist cities as “correcting”

themselves, catching up to their Western counterparts. As Martin Ouředníček writes,

“The need for an appropriate explanatory and predictive basis within post-socialist

urban geography, coupled with the newly opened borders, the rejection of the

socialist past, and the admiration of everything Western, have created ideal conditions

for an uncritical implantation of Western theoretical concepts, for the westernization

of the spoken language in general, and in academic vocabulary in particular” (2016,

547). Nearly three decades later, postsocialist urbanists have begun to realize the

problematics of such an approach, now more apt to acknowledge the limitations of

Western conceptual frames, aligning themselves with postcolonial urban studies. But

33

nevertheless, as Ӧrjan Sjӧberg worries, postcolonial urban studies, much like

postcolonial studies more generally, always seems to do the heavy theoretical lifting,

while postsocialism becomes used simply as a geographic or temporal descriptive,

with postsocialist cities simply rendered “case studies onto themselves” (2014)—a

concern shared by critical scholars of postsocialism more generally. As such, here I

think alongside Atanasoski and Vora (2018) in their provocation to consider what

postsocialism as method might do to studies of postsocialist techno-urban formations.

Postsocialism as Method

Racial technocapitalism in the postsocialist city, violent as it is, and

dynamically magnetized as it is to both old and new centers of global capitalism, does

not reduce peripheral lifeworlds simply as racial technocapitalism’s effects. In order

to read these worlds outside of racial technocapitalism’s purview, one might learn

from the leftover time of the maidane. Otherwise, such lifetimes only appear to be an

effect of capitalism, without their own agency and analytics. As Starosta suggests, in

postsocialist times, “perverse modes of personhood and locution—deriving from the

socialist past but not reducible either to its official doctrines or to its official dissident

cultures—persist in the present” (2014, 207).

By aligning with those whose lives and struggles disrupt the common time of

post-1989 global neoliberalism, one might read postsocialist urbanization as a racial

technology that recodes both historical and transnational modes of racial banishment,

dispossession, and possession in the name of liberal democracy and the liberal

(techno)human who constitutes it. As Roy offers, “the foundational dispossession of

34

certain subjects is constitutive of liberalism and its economic geographies” (2017,

A9). Postsocialist Eastern Europe is an integral space from which to theorize

liberalism and its neoliberal iterations, as not only was the collapse of socialism

designed by proponents of liberal democracy, but after its disintegration, Silicon

Valley imperialism crafted postsocialist space as a laboratory for racial

technocapitalism. It is thereby useful to focus upon how everyday lives and intimate

spaces have been impacted by technologies of transition.

Unbecoming Silicon Valley engages in a multimethodological and

interdisciplinary practices of reading other lifeworlds and studying archives, fiction,

media, and infrastructure. In doing so, I follow Lisa Lowe’s methodological approach

of “reading across archives” to understand the “intimacies and contemporaneities that

traverse distinct and separately studied ‘areas’” (2015, 6). Doing so unsettles, she

writes, “the discretely bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized

by a national history invested in isolated origins and in dependent progressive

development” (ibid., 6). Following her lead, I suggest that to understand both racial

technocapitalism and Silicon Valley imperialism in postsocialist Romania, one must

depart from isolated practices of only reading from one genre, but also only from

singular geographies and temporalities. Here I read from an array of sources and

spacetimes, from Communist archives of informatics and computation to speculative

fiction created in postsocialist space, from urban planning logs of Siliconized space to

infrastructure itself.

The need for a more interdisciplinary approach in understanding the unique

layering of geographies, technocultures, and urbanities, invokes Arjun Appadurai’s

35

writing on technoscapes, or the disjunctures imposed when technological

development entwines with global flows of people, cultures, and capital in irregularly

shaped spaces (1990). Technoscapes, he suggested decades ago now, can of course be

understood in part by traditional indicators and comparisons such as World Bank

reports, but the complexity that underlies their formation “are further out of reach of

the ‘queen of the social sciences’ than ever before” (1990, 298). In part, this is

because technoscapes are also informed by imaginaries, from those of imagined

worlds to those of imagined communities, from those of financial speculators to those

of housing justice activists speculating upon anti-capitalist technological futures

(Anderson 1983; Bahng 2017). Imaginaries bear material effects upon geographies of

postsocialist gentrification. To read and learn from them, one must, in addition to

engaging in anthropological fieldwork, look to the creative work, literature, counter-

maps, and media created at the interstices of both socialist and Siliconized

technoscapes.

In part, Appadurai writes of technoscapes and their transnationality against the

tradition of area studies and its tight bounding of geopolitical space, a claustrophobic

mapping practice that partitions the globe into digestible fragments for US

scholarship and governance alike (1996). Like Intel’s x86 microprocessor, area

studies emerged under the auspices of Cold War knowledge production. While the

Intel’s technology was hacked, modified, and altered by those in Romania to get

away from technocapitalism’s paywall, critical area studies too has emerged to

provide think accounts and details needed to decenter Western vocabularies,

promoting transnationalism, fieldwork immersion, linguistic proficiency, and even

36

interdisciplinary inquiry (Arondekar and Patel 2016, 155). Indeed, despite its Cold

War incentives to apportion space, as David Ludden suggests, area studies has

become perhaps “the most creative venue for studies of imperialism and the imperial

aspects of globalization,” having become “a necessary counterweight to the

decontextualizing force of universal globalism” (2003, 136). This has incited scholars

such as Warwick Anderson to propose postcolonial area studies of technoscience

(2009, 169), one that Fa-ti Fan argues must be “non-essentializing and de-

territorializing” (2007, 8). In engaging in such a practice, Anderson, also building off

of Kuan-hsing Chen’s work on “Asia as method” (2010, 223), asks what it might

mean to theorize “Asia as method in Science and Technology Studies (STS)” (2012).

For Anderson, such an approach, rather than establishing a canon or methodology,

points to a locus of enunciation, one that aims to decolonize Western universalism

Yet also, as a mode of border thinking (Anzaldúa 1987), such an approach

understands the simultaneity of the local and global, yet it remains open to multiple

frames of reference.

Building upon Anderson’s provocation, here I ask, what might it mean to

theorize postsocialism as method in Science and Technology Studies (STS)? For one,

it would engage what Atanasoski and Vora describe as pluralizing postsocialism as

method (2018), or the studying of local and transnational socialisms of the now and

of futures past through a multitemporal and multi-spatial scope, shattering fictions of

socialism’s and capitalism’s supposed singularities. In addition, theorizing Romania

as method in STS understands the frictions of Romanian socialist and transitional-era

technoscapes as they brush upon against those of Silicon Valley imperialism. The

37

frictions that these bifurcated yet entangled technological worlds pose and repose

with each other is far from monolithic; they look different depending upon one’s

vantage point.

Ethnographic methods, consisting of formal interviews, as well as participant

observation, are integral in understanding not only the material impacts of IT

globalization, but also how different understandings of futurity, technology, and

postsocialism collide and entangle. Ethnography facilitates the weaving together of

complex perspectives, from those compiled at tech meetups to those of socialist-era

hardware engineers now unemployed and nostalgic. It offers a lens through which to

read the imaginaries of Light Revolution liberals to those organizing for housing

justice from the maidane of urban renewal. Ethnography can help map the frictions of

postsocialist spacetime, for instance those in US rental property technology call

centers in Cluj, and those of Hackerville, the infamous mountain town where

computer hackers such as Guccifer (known for hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails)

have emerged. Indeed, in the wake of the 2016 US elections, Romania, Russia, and

Silicon Valley have emerged as more tightly entwined than ever. An interdisciplinary

ethnographic approach sheds light on its tautness, foregrounding the material effects

of Silicon Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism alike.

The research that follows has been conducted in collaboration with two

housing activist groups that I am part of in Romania, as well as one critical

cartography and digital humanities collective that I cofounded in San Francisco, the

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP). Emerging in the height of the San Francisco

Bay Area’s Tech Boom 2.0, the AEMP has since been documenting dispossession

38

and resistance struggles in Silicon Valley’s backyard (McElroy 2019). Committed to

theorizing technological futures outside those of technocapitalism, the AEMP looks at

technofutures past and present that use technology to fight against the racially

dispossessive effects of Silicon Valley. I explore the AEMP more in length in Chapter

4, which studies racial dispossession in Silicon Valley’s own California backyard. As

I suggest, postsocialist analytics, along with community-led critical cartography

projects, are useful tools in understanding the present.

In recent years, the AEMP has collaborated with Bucharest’s Frontul Comun

pentru Dreptul la Locuire (Common Front for the Right to Housing / FCDL) and Căși

Sociale Acum, based in Cluj, to produce data and analytics useful to anti-

displacement organizing. The two Romanian collectives work with displaced tenants,

holding direct actions and community events for housing justice. Operating outside of

NGO and non-profit models, priority is placed upon producing work that directly

empowers on-the-ground struggles, creating research with and not for communities

most impacted by postsocialist disaster capitalism (Klein 2007; Tallbear 2014). In this

dissertation, I draw upon collaborative work conducted with the AEMP, FCDL, and

Căși, for instance in Chapter 1 where I explore double dispossession in postsocialist

Cluj, or the process in which Roma are physically evicted to the maidane of urban

renewal as Western digital nomads and “digital Gypsies” displace Roma in

allegorical incantation. At the same time, drawing upon this collaborative work, much

of which relies upon and crafts new technologies and critical cartographic methods, I

question, how might mapping racial dispossession as connected across time and space

help create new forms of international solidarity? How might we use technology to

39

create technofutures unrecognizable to Silicon Valley imperialism?

In her provocation to entwinte comparative literature and area studies (2003),

Gayatri Spivak writes, “Just as socialism at its best would persistently and repeatedly

wrench capital away from capitalism, so must the new Comparative Literature

persistently and repeatedly undermine and undo the definitive tendency of the

dominant to appropriate the emergent” (2003, 100). Not writing for a new

comparative literature, but rather for a new understanding of techno-urbanism in

Romania, it appears that without an interdisciplinary lens attentive to both local and

transnational field languages, the imaginaries and materialities that enable the

becoming and unbecoming of Silicon Valley fall flat. It is this practice of intertwining

the local and transnational, while attending to the temporal technological

entanglements of futures past and present, that I describe as a connected and

postsocialist methodological approach. Postsocialist Romania, as part of Western

Europe’s own maidane, bears its own heterogenous technocultures and technologies

of race, but these are always in some way entangled with the West, refusing

singularity and any semblance of postsocialist common time.

At the same time, I suggest here that postsocialist analytics are important in

theorizing urban transformation even within the Bay Area, where increasingly

commonist space, from public bus stops to public parks, from SRO hotels to

sidewalks, are unevenly being appropriated and expropriated by Silicon Valley

imperialism. Silicon Valley itself is a Cold War phenomenon, with its imperiality

constitutive of posts and ghosts. Digital nomadism emerges from these specters,

updating Romantic Orientalism while landing upon pre-socialist fascist fantasies.

40

Why should postsocialist urban studies be confined to formerly socialist space,

especially if the post-Cold War is global? What might considerations of postsocialist

temporality do to understandings of urban transformations across the planet, from

Bucharest to Berkeley, from the Silicon Valley of Europe to that of California?

Chapter Map

My first chapter, “Digital Nomads in Siliconizing Cluj: Material and

Allegorical Double Dispossession,” studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj,

Romania. I focus upon what I describe as double dispossession, in which “digital

nomads” allegorize technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one

hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital

nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj

Siliconizes, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated digital

nomad/Gypsy. As I suggest, this figure discursively drags with it onto-

epistemological residues of 19th-century Orientalism—a literary genre that emerged

within the heart of Western European empires. The recoding of the nomad today, I

argue, indexes techno-imperiality. Double dispossession, as a phenomenon, makes

clear that prior histories bolster, and are consumed by, globalizing techno-

imperialism. Here I advocate for a connected rather than comparative approach in

understanding double dispossession, focusing upon connections across time, space,

and genre.

My second chapter, “Corrupting Techno-normativity in Postsocialist

Romania: Queering Code and Computers,” looks the remembering and recoding of

41

socialist-era and transitional “corrupt” technology in the postsocialist present. I focus

upon how prior technocultures, wires, games, and computers have laid the

groundwork for contemporary Siliconization, which attempts to coopt and erase the

infastructures of the past all at once. Today, outside of corporately funded

hackathons, other technoscapes also live, often pathologized by the West as

threatening the longevity of techno-normative time. In investigating socialist

underground IT cultures that have endured since socialism, I ask, how can Romanian

cyber deviance pervert the temporality of Silicon Valley techno-imperialism, while

queering the analytics used to understand the reproduction of contemporary

technoscapes? Might it be that narratives of Siliconization are heteronormative in

their framing of temporality, and that by queering postsocialism, other understandings

come into play? In asking these questions, I look to speculative techno futures past

and yet-to-come.

In “The Light Revolution, Blood Gold, and the New Times of IKEA:

Impossible Spaces of Dissent,” I examine postsocialism as an emerging theoretical

concept useful in assessing contestations of post-1989 liberalism. Rather than fall into

stereotypical invocations of Eastern Europe as a historical and geopolitical site from

which to prefigure of illiberalism and totalitarianism in a post-Brexit and post-Trump

era West, I instead ask, what can Eastern European postsocialist politics of protest,

development, and renewal teach us about the perils of liberalism? How does the

reorganization of public and private space undergird the conditions of forgetting that

enable postsocialist disaster capitalism, which speaks not only about Eastern

European specificity, but also more broadly about the contradictions of Euro-

42

American liberalism made apparent in its recent crisis? Empirically, I study the 2013

Save Roșia Montană campaign against a Canadian goldmining company. I trace the

movement’s adaptation into a liberal space of “all protestors matter” ethos, which I

suggest helps explain the liberalism of the 2017 Light Revolution protests against

socialism, corruption, and technological backwardness. As I ask, why is it that today,

hundreds of thousands take to the streets to purge socialist ghosts, but not the

violence of neoliberal corporations, for instance, IKEA, which has been clearcutting

Romanian forests at alarming rates, and which bears actual fascist histories? Posing

these questions allows me to investigate the contours of the political within a

particular postsocialism-liberalism nexus.

My fourth chapter, “Postsocialism, Technofascism, and the Tech Boom 2.0:

From Technologies of Racial/spatial Dispossession to the Dark Enlightenment,”

centers upon the postsocialist spatiotemporality of Bay Area gentrification, postracial

liberalism, techno-utopics, technofascism, and antifascist dissent in the post-Cold

War Bay Area. Postsocialist temporality here envelops Tech 2.0, which follows the

racial booms and busts of the late-1990s Dot Com Boom and the 2008 subprime

mortgage crisis. The Cold War and its cessation, I argue, are key events in

understanding the Bay Area’s tech booms. At the same time, Bay Area Siliconized

geography is an apt spatiotemporality from which to theorize postsocialism. In this

way, I read postsocialism as a heterogeneous and global condition, as well as an

analytic entry point for understanding contemporary political rearrangements,

continuities, and discontinuities that inform whiteness and liberalism in the Bay Area.

In reading contemporary Bay Area techno-urban transformations ethnographically, it

43

becomes clear that regional racial, fascist, and liberal imaginaries today are not only

haunted by, but also co-constitutive of, Cold War ghosts, posts, and updates. How

might we read new forms of data colonialism enacted by companies such as

Facebook as techno-imperial and as a product of post-Cold War times? How might a

postsocialist approach to post-Cold War Silicon Valley enable new insights regarding

techno-imperial algorithms?

Maintaining a postsocialist analytic, the fifth chapter, “Hacking the Inimical

of Post-Cold War Time: Mr. Robot, the Dark Army, and the Doomsday Machine,”

explores the framing of contemporary hacking plots, from the fictive ones of Sam

Esmail’s television series, Mr. Robot, to contemporary attacks on the Democratic

Party, blamed on Russia. Critical of how US dystopic imaginaries have transformed

bombs into hacks, I study the liberal conjuring of Cold War ghosts as they frame

postsocialist spaces such as Hackerville as centers of illiberalism. From the fictive

hacking groups of Mr. Robot such as F Society and the Dark Army, to hackers

Guccifer and Guccifer 2.0 – Romanian and Russian monikers made infamous for

having hacked the Democratic Party—cybersecurity threats have reached the level of

bomb in nuclear Cold War culture. Thus, in this chapter, I focus upon postsocialist

temporality, postsocialist technoculture, and the crisis of liberalism, particularly as

the latter reinterprets racial, fascist, and imperial configurations. As I ask, how, in the

Cold War 2.0, have understandings of both the enemy and temporality been hacked?

My final chapter, “Non-Alignment in Outer Space: From the Ruins of

Postsocialist Astrofuturism,” focuses upon socialist outer space cosmologies as

portrayed in Romanian film, art, and speculative fiction. While space race desires

44

contoured technological dreams on both sides of the Iron Curtain, little work has

explored Communist intergalactic visions. Where Western conversations on

Astrofuturism position the galaxy as either a place to colonize or to create anti-racist

futures within, what happens when we shift lenses to the time and space of socialism?

By reading futurist and social realist work, I study dreams of developing anti-

capitalist and anti-fascist utopias in outer space, to then cultivating them on earth.

These ambitions correlated with dreams for a third-world internationalism, yet

Romania’s ability to confront its own internal racism remained questionable. As I

question, is this in part why Romania never fully managed to join the non-alignment

movement and sustain its utopic dreams in outer space?

The epilogue, “Blackface on the Nightshift, Proptech AI, and the Posthuman

Landlord,” looks at novel forms of anti-Black racism in postsocialist Romania, and

how racism transits. Most focus is placed upon the Invitation Homes call center in

Cluj. Invitation Homes, the US’s largest landlord corporations, a post-2008

phenomenon, that now also uses property technology and artificial intelligence to

manage its real estate. But it also outsources labor, creating contexts in which both

anti-Black racism and anti-Eastern European xenophobia entangle. What do these

practices reveal about postsocialism, race, and technology in a postsocialist moment?

How does race travel through technology, and how might a connected approach help

chart new routes for international solidarity?

45

Chapter 1: Digital Nomads in Siliconizing Cluj: Material and Allegorical Double Dispossession

In 2018, Cluj-Napoca’s mayor Emil Boc announced the introduction of a

public robot named Antonia as part of Cluj, Romania’s newfound status as “the

Silicon Valley of Europe.” Although Antonia proved only to be a computer

algorithm, lacking the robotic stock image body displayed in the press, she, as the

first “public robot mayoral servant,” was nevertheless conjured as part of a

widespread techno-futurist vision reflected in Romanian infrastructure and

imaginaries alike. One only has to momentarily walk through Cluj’s Mărăști

neighborhood to breathe in new construction particles and observe fiber optic cabling

sticking out of buildings like alien tentacles, waiting to be connected. Former

industrial socialist factories, from the Flacăra textiles factory to the Napochim plastics

factory, are being converted into IT plants for foreign firms like Bosch and iQuest, or

into fancier residential blocks.

Blocks away, the co-working ClujHub just relocated to the top floor of the

Central Commercial Center, a socialist-era department store opened in the 1970s.

There, talks, gatherings, and meetups occur around the clock, mostly geared towards

inculcating Romanian programmers with entrepreneurial skills. These spaces also

attract “digital nomads,” transient IT workers largely hailing from the West.

Sometimes digital nomads just enter Romania briefly to give talks; sometimes they

reside for longer, taking advantage of Cluj’s budding IT scene, largely dictated by

practices of Western outsourcing. Outsourcing, also known in Romania as

“nearshoring” due to the country’s geographic proximity to “the West,” scripts

46

Romanian IT workers into the robots of Western technocapitalism. Often, outsourcing

is directed by digital nomads and Western IT firms alike.

Digital nomads, also problematically self-ascribed as “digital Gypsies,” refer

to tech workers who both fantasize and actualize the dream of being able to live and

work anywhere, while at the same time remaining plugged into Silicon Valley

infrastructures, economies, and lifeworlds. Divorced from Roma materialities and

identities, digital nomad/Gypsy fantasies today rather resemble 19th-century

Romantic Orientalist narratives written by white men from the hearts of European

empires that fetishize “Gypsy freedom” (Lemon 2000; Saul 2007; Trumpener 1995).

These feature bourgeois protagonists who exoticize the freedom and taboo of the

racialized, sexualized Gypsy—an allegorical figure that, like the digital nomad,

abstracts and mutilates diverse Roma experiences. Outside of Western texts, most

Roma are not “nomadic,” and many have been subject to violent histories of forced

displacement, racial dispossession, and racist representation (Achim 2004; Lancione

2018; Pusca 2015; Woodcock 2007). Why is it that digital nomads/Gypsies allegorize

technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity, while Roma evictees are

subjected to forced nomadism to make way for their arrivals? What does this have to

do with past imperial forms and fantasies?

In Siliconizing Cluj, digital nomadism today is accompanied by forced and

racialized “nomadism” for others. It was in the dead of a cold December night in

2010 that a collective of over 300 Roma residents were displaced from their homes on

Coastei Street in the city-center, so that the Finnish IT company, Nokia, could

construct a downtown office building. While much of the city heralded the migration

47

of the tech company’s branch from Germany to Romania, representing in the popular

imaginary modernization and Europeanization, the displaced Roma, many of whom

were forcibly relocated to “social housing” adjacent to the city’s municipal waste site,

Pata Rât, felt differently. Nokia had been offered a two-year tax break to move to

Cluj, through a city-initiated program to incentivize tech growth. However, before the

office was completed, Nokia abandoned its Romanian outpost altogether to relocate

to China, where new tax breaks awaited.

In the temporality of postsocialism, Roma matters are spatial matters.4 Today,

the displaced Roma residents remain mired in the toxicity of Pata Rât, beached upon

the maidane—supposedly uninhabitable wastelands squeezed between the rural and

urban. Stranded in postsocialist space, Romania’s most racially subjugated minority

are pushed into toxic sinkholes as tech speculation takes hold. There, in postsocialist

time, the rhythm of modernity’s drumbeat only registers as progress to some.

This chapter looks at the spatialization of inherited yet global dispossessions

in postsocialist Cluj. It focuses upon how digital nomads and global IT capital use

material advantages to unwittingly (and sometimes wittingly) appropriate the spaces

and identities of Roma, whose lives are made more precarious as a result of

gentrification. While Roma are materially dispossessed to make way for new IT

office buildings and residential complexes, they are doubly dispossessed by the

conjuration of the deracinated digital nomad/Gypsy. As I suggest, this figure

discursively drags with it onto-epistemological (Barad 2003) residues of 19-century

Orientalism—a literary genre that emerged within the heart of Western European

empires. Orientalist texts frequently appropriated “Gypsy” freedom to allegorize the

48

sexuality and raciality of Western imperialism. The figure being updated today, I

argue, indexes the imperiality of technocapitalism, or techno-imperialism. As in the

past, nomadic fantasy hinges upon a Western imperial hub, one that has expanded

from Western Europe to now also include California’s Silicon Valley.

One might venture that racial dispossession in the Silicon Valley of Europe

mimics that of other Siliconizing spaces, most obviously the gentrifying San

Francisco Bay Area where tech speculation incites the rampant displacement of

tenants of color (Maharawal and McElroy 2018). There are also other “Silicon

Valleys” popping up across the world, including, but not limited to: Silicon Alley in

New York City, Silicon Fen in Cambridge, Silicon Wadi in Israel, Silicon Mountain

in Cameroon, Silicon Cape in South Africa, Silicon Savannah in Nairobi, Silicon

Lagoon in Lagos, Silicon Island in Kyushu, Silicon Plateau in Bangalore, Silicon

Peninsula in Dailan, Silicon Paradise in Costa Rica, Silicon Bayou in New Orleans,

Silicon Valley North in Ontario, Silicon Forest in Portland, Silicon Slopes in Salt

Lake City, Silicon Prairie in Dallas, Silicon Hills in Austin, Silicon Beach in Los

Angeles, another “Silicon Valley of the East” in Penang, Silicon Gulf in the

Philippines, Silicon Oasis in Dubai, Silicon Saxony in Dresden, Silicon Allee in

Berlin, Silicon Docks in Dublin (considered another European Silicon Valley), and

the list really does go on and on. Understanding these spaces as undergoing similar

phenomena, for instance evictions, might invoke universalizing methods and

analytics (e.g. Eviction Lab 2019; Slater 2017), as well as urban studies literature on

comparative urbanism, plantetary gentrification, and global cities (e.g. Shin, Lees,

and López-Morales 2016; Robinson 2011). While there is exciting work being in

49

these domains, particularly work critical of Anglo-American theoretical dominance

(Ghertner 2016; Roy 2017), the phenomenon of Siliconization, as well as double

dispossession, in Cluj, for instance, calls for an approach beyond traditional urban

studies and social scientific studies, attentive to complex interplays of imperialism,

temporality, globalization, and race. This is not to deny the importance of

comparative work, but it is to also call for something else.

In assessing these entanglements in postsocialist, Siliconizing Cluj, it becomes

clear that prior histories bolster the present. Postcolonial and postsocialist studies

offer important perspectives in understanding this history. Their analytics are useful

in theorizing racial dispossession locally and globally, but also materially,

allegorically, and historically. Spivak, in writing of the Siliconization of Bangalore

and the historic dislocations it recodes, suggests, “Every rupture is also repetition”

(2000, 5). Building upon this, I argue that the Siliconization of Cluj is only possible

through the accumulation of material and allegorical dispossessions (double

dispossession), put in “friction” with new global flows and entangled histories (Barad

2011; 2017; Tsing 2005). I thus advocate for a connected rather than only

comparative approach in understanding double dispossession in times of techno-

imperialism, one that, while rooted in place, analyzes tethered displacements across

time, space, and genre.

A connected approach highlights what I describe as racial technocapitalism, a

global racial project that flourishes under the conditions of postsocialist

“development” and “democratization,” both techno-imperial projects. Racial

technocapitalism draws upon and then attempts to overwrite the earlier racial projects

50

upon which it relies—a mode of Spivak’s repetitive rupture-making. These earlier

projects include slavery and failed reparations in Romania, as well as settler colonial

violence of the 19th century Western Europe that deracinated Roma lifeworlds.

Racial technocapitalism and techno-imperialism are thus twin concepts that I rely

upon here to theorize entangled histories as they manifest in and between postsocialist

Romania and Silicon Valley. The figure of the digital nomad, also racial, marks the

spatiotemporality of this new techno-entanglement.

In what follows, I explore double dispossession by thinking from the maidane

of allegory and evictions, and by thinking from the time and space of globalization.

First, I introduce the concept of digital nomadism and the Silicon Valley desires it co-

constitutes. I proceed to retrieve allegorical genealogies of digital nomadism, looking

to 19th-century Orientalist literature. 19th-century subjunctive forms are now being

updated to both allegorize and enable techno-imperialism. This illuminates why

traditional urban studies scholarship alone is insufficient in theorizing digital

nomadism, techno-imperialism, and racial technocapitalism. Other approaches

attentive to fantasy and history are requisite, for instance the reading of contemporary

media pieces, 19th-century Orientalist literature, digital nomad blogs, and antiracist

digital story-maps—all of which I study here to supplement ethnographic work.

This ethnographic research in Cluj largely transpired between 2016 and 2018,

and it informs three empirical sections. This includes a study of racial property

histories before, during, and after socialism. I also map the racial banishment that

Roma residents experience amidst Siliconization. Lastly, I turn to the landing of

digital nomads in Cluj as they constitute, and are co-constituted by, techno-

51

imperialism. In these sections, I draw upon narrative data collected with Căși Sociale

ACUM (Căși / Social Housing NOW), a housing justice collective with whom I

collaborate. Căși works with displaced tenants, many of whom are Roma, conducting

research that directly empowers on-the-ground struggles. With Căși, I collaboratively

produced an online interactive story-map, Dislocari, referenced in this chapter.

Dislocari features narratives and eviction routes of seven Roma residents now living

in Cluj’s waste site, Pata Rât. Each narrator describes a series of past displacements

from the city-center that eventually landed them in the maidane. Their stories shed

light on the longue durée of racial dispossession upon which techno-imperialism

rests. These narratives disrupt digital nomad notions that Roma mobility is steeped in

enchantment.

Digital Nomadism

While digital nomads can be understood as a genre of “lifestyle migrants,” or

middle-class and wealthy Western travelers who profit from incomes earned at high

rungs of uneven global labor divisions, and while urban studies scholars are

importantly linking the landing of lifestyle migrants with contexts of transnational

and tourism-related gentrification (Hayes 2014; Cócola-Gant 2018), digital nomads

are also embedded in older colonial allegorical structures. Thus, in addition to

understanding digital nomadism through urban studies and globalization frameworks,

cultural, literary, and decolonial analyses are also useful. As Claudia Breger suggests,

to displace the dominant and disfiguring narratives written about “Gypsies,” we might

have to read them “in terms of their discursive constitution as well as with regard to

52

the (fictional and/or historical) lives of their protagonists, narrators and authors”

(133). Following her lead, in this section I explore the fictional and historical lives of

digital nomads—their desires, their world views, and their genealogies. In doing so, I

focus on the racial, sexual, and colonial contours that undergird digital nomadic

lifeworlds. As I argue, 19th-century forms haunt contemporary dreams of

spatiotemporal independence. By seeing how discursive forms inhere over time,

insights are gained into contemporary spatiotemporal processes that otherwise would

be hidden in urban studies analyses.

As a phenomenon, digital nomadism is often attributed to Tsugio Makimoto

and David Manners and their 1997 Digital Nomad, in which they presaged a future

run by wealthy IT business professionals, equipped with a “digital toolkit,” who could

live a life of “location independence.” But even decades earlier, other speculative

futurists such as Arthur C. Clarke envisaged the idea, foretelling a world much like

today, in which “any businessman, any executive, could live almost anywhere on

earth and still do his business” (Australian Broadcasting Company 1974). As he

elaborated, “In the global world of the future, it will be like if you’re living in one

small town, anywhere anytime, about a third of your friends will be asleep. . . So, you

may have to abolish time zones completely, and all go on the common time, the same

time for everybody” (AT&T 1976).

Clarke’s “common time” is the same time that many of today’s digital nomads

venerate as enabling location independence. Just as digital nomad racial fantasies of

today are no longer confined to 19th-century allegories, neither are they restrained to

Clarke’s speculative fiction—though one can argue that differences between

53

speculative fiction and reality have always been fictive. As Aimee Bahng suggests,

“Both financial speculation and speculative fiction participate in the cultural

production of futurity – a term that highlights the construction of ‘the future’ and

denaturalizes its singularity, even while acknowledging its substantial effects on how

we materialize the present” (2015, 666). Today, in the words of Alexis Lothian, “the

spectacle of speculative destruction converges intimately with the unpredictable yet

repetitive events of climate change; science fiction imagery becomes

indistinguishable from news reports” (2018, 2). Yet at the same time, queer,

decolonial, and Afrofuturist speculative future writing from the past has opened up

future possibilities and imaginaries of the present (brown and Imarisha 2015; Muñoz

2009). But here, it might be that technological forecasting of the Cold War 1970s

opened up digital transit and technocapitalist fantasies of the present. For instance,

today’s digital nomads are paid Silicon Valley salaries, and enjoy easy transit

between “exotic” locales, aligned with Clarke’s projections. From the Latinx Mission

District of San Francisco to spaces farther away from Silicon Valley, such as Bali and

Bucharest, digital nomads traverse the globe without losing capital to tourism costs.

For instance, James Taylor, who identifies as an “award-winning entrepreneur,” a

“white middle-class professional living in a first world country,” wrote a 2011 blog

post describing the rise of this new lifestyle. He and his wife transit between Europe

and the US running app-enabled auto-pilot businesses. In his words, “being a Digital

Gypsy is more a frame of mind than genealogy” (Taylor 2011). As his testimony

evidences, the Gypsy/nomad endures transnationally, enabled by Silicon Valley

technology capital and infrastructure.

54

As becomes evident when studying Gypsy fictions and their colonial

geographies, Gypsy figures often emerge from the hearts of imperial geographies,

thereby reflecting imperial consciousness. Walter Mignolo writes of how, by latticing

itself with coloniality during the Renaissance, modernity became the inevitable

present of history, with Europe as its center. Afterwards, during the Enlightenment,

Greenwich was remapped as “the zero point of global time,” or the common time of

the era (2011, 22). During the 19th century, at the height of Romantic Orientalism

and numerous European colonial projects, imperialism encapsulated new times and

spaces into the common time of empire. Gypsy novellas, poems, and theater reflected

colonial aspiration, along with imperial ambivalence and violence. In this way, Gypsy

fiction mapped imperial dreams as they manifested new frontiers, often within

Europe.

Romanticism, as a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement positioned

against industrialization, Enlightenment norms, and the logics of scientific

rationalization, reached its peak by the mid-19th century, remapping national

geographies of self-determination. Aesthetically, it embraced the sublimity of nature,

emotion, spontaneity, individual heroism, and imaginaries of ancient national

traditions, characterized by “a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst

through old and cramping form . . . expressing an unappeasable yearning for

unattainable goals” (Berlin 1990, 92). This restlessness interpellated the Gypsy into

popularized epic poetry and novellas, where the figure effectively became the

workhorse of national movements across the continent, connecting one imperial

project to the next.

55

This coincided with the rise of Orientalism, a system that juxtaposed the

exotic and haunting worlds of the Orient against those of a progressive, mechanistic,

and cold Europe.5 Roma, who have been more prevalent in Eastern Europe since their

medieval continental entrance, and who originally (albeit complexly) migrated in

multiple waves from Northern India a millennium ago, have long been considered an

Oriental European object. At the time, Orientalist fantasies of the East were

frequently represented through racial and sexual symbolization, most prominently in

graphic imagery of white Western men possessing sexually submissive Eastern

women as a “male power fantasy” (Said 1978, 247). So too were Roma racialized and

sexualized in European Orientalist literature. Therefore, the Gypsy in 19th-century

texts stands in for peripheralized, less-than European locales, while simultaneously

legitimizing the ontology of the nomadic colonizer.

As I suggest, it is no small coincidence that Gypsy allegorical forms are

reinterpreted today. Contemporary Silicon Valley imperium—a phenomenon in

which the Valley materializes new nodes and edges to facilitate surplus capital

accumulation—is enabled by a nomadic avatar conditioned by 19th-century

subjunctive forms. In other words, digital nomads both enable and constitute Silicon

Valley imperialism. Silicon Valley Time has now abdicated Greenwich Mean Time’s

throne, a resignation that remains illusory yet integral to digital nomadic

spatiotemporal visions, or Clarke’s “common time.” Often also illusory to the

settler/nomad are its material effects, not to mention its genealogical underpinnings.

Few digital nomads that I have spoken with or read consider the ways in which their

landing and settling a place contributes to its gentrification, and none have

56

acknowledged the racial appropriation upon which their avatar depends.

Take, for instance, digital nomad Matt Mullenweg of the San Francisco

startup Automatic. In a recent film on digital nomadism by Youjin Do, “One Way

Ticket: The Rise of the Digital Nomad,” Mullenweg brags that 95 percent of his 400

employees live outside of San Francisco, in 47 countries. He aims to attract talent that

questions, “Why do I have to commute to Mountain View every day and sit in a

bunch of meetings and things like that?” As Mullenweg ventures, prospective

employees will think, “Maybe I want to live in Mountain View part of the year, but

maybe during the summer I want to go to Italy, or to Thailand, or Australia, or

wherever it is, it doesn’t matter” (qtd. in Do). But as much as he promulgates

spatiotemporal flexibility, his company’s nomads remain tethered to the physical

concreteness and centrality of San Francisco—Silicon Valley’s urban outpost. In-

person meetings are still held there, and physical mail is still sent. Also, rents there

have become the United States’ most expensive.

Meanwhile, when departing from San Francisco and other Western locales,

digital nomads often contribute to new forms of gentrification upon arrival. As digital

nomad Kay self-critiques by blog: “This is gentrification at its simplest. This is

globalization. This is the result of some very selfish, very narrow thinking” (2015).

Continuing, “Every dollar we spend, every blog post we write, and every coworking

space we patronize contributes to this inequality.” Not all digital nomads are this self-

critical, and there are variations and discrepancies amongst them. There are wealthy

nomads from San Francisco who live months at a time in various locales, who

periodically return to their companies’ headquarters. Others from Western European

57

countries now permanently live in Romania, where they manage Western outsourcing

firms. Some digital nomads have moved to Romania to take advantage of cheap

labor, and to launch their own startups. Others are not employed by firms, and instead

pick up online gigs as they meander. I have interviewed several nomads of each of

these genres in Cluj, and have found that while their stories all vary, the fact that they

benefit from Western incomes is constant.

Today, there are countless meetups, blogs, websites, and even comparative

ranking sites advertising prime locations for nomadism. As one self-proclaimed

libertarian digital nomad from San Francisco articulated in a Cluj café, the idea of

settling down is not at all appealing to his millennial generation. The world is global,

and success means being at home in the global world. “People used to brag about

buying and selling real estate developments. I brag about developing my own apps

while living in Airbnbs.” As Kyle Chaykya (2018) writes, “In the competitive

freelance economy, geographic mobility has become a superficial sign of both

success and creative freedom: the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time.”

For digital nomads, location independence is often enabled by a phenomenon

that digital nomad “guru” Timothy Ferris, popularized as “geoarbitrage.” This refers

to geographic arbitrage, which offers a spatial dimension to the financial concept of

arbitrage, in which commodities and labor are bought and sold in different markets or

derivative forms to take advantage of better prices. While geoarbitrage effectively

expanded post-Bretton Woods with the end of the Gold Standard era, with speculators

deriving new tactics of profit and extraction, in more recent it has been adopted by

lifestyle migrants (Hayes 2014, 1954). “Digital Gypsy” James Taylor, for instance,

58

uses outsourced labor platforms like Elance and ODesk to accumulate money in his

bank account while he sleeps.

While geoarbitrage is real, and in the case of digital nomadism, undoubtedly

linked to fantasies and materialities of location independence, there are more than

simply capital calculations that determine where digital nomads land. As scholars of

racial capitalism argue, the spatial inheres the racial, and one cannot theorize the

contours of what Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession” (2003) without also

centering how racism has always informed the workings of capital (Chakravartty and

Silva 2012). As Gaurav Jashnani, Priscilla Bustamante, and Brett Stoudt suggest

(2017), processes of racial dispossession in gentrifying contexts are best understood

as “dispossession by accumulation.” Thus, dispossession itself is accumulative,

stockpiling up histories of racialized acts of eviction, containment, and expulsion. By

inversing Harvey’s formula, here they suggest that not only does wealth accumulate

by expropriating people and land, but that dispossession too is cumulative. Put

otherwise, displacement is not a one-time event that dispossesses one person or entity

so that another can profit; profit inheres multiple displacements, all with multiple

temporalities and geographies that coalesce in particular spatiotemporal conjectures.

Double dispossession is one form of accumulative dispossession, in which allegorical

and material dispossessive histories compile and grow. It takes an interdisciplinary

approach to understand this layering, one attentive to entangled rather than only

comparative histories and geographies.

Further, as Megan Moodie and Lisa Rofel write, in postsocialist contexts,

Harvey’s understanding of the production of privatization and accumulation in times

59

of neoliberalism often elides unique postsocialist rearrangements of blurred private

and public domains (forthcoming). This is certainly the case in Romania, where what

was nationalized housing, infrastructure, and factories are now being re/privatized,

while “social housing” is being crafted by municipalities along with Norwegian

NGOs and Christian charities in public waste sites. Reading across sites and genres,

while connecting the past with present, illuminates the raciality of double

dispossession in postsocialist contexts and its particular, rather than random,

geographies.

In Cluj, double dispossession transpires through the accumulation of racist

histories and fantasies. Other racial histories undergird the Siliconization of Cluj and

the new contradictions of mobility that such processes inhere. Further, it is necessary

to merge the practice of urban study with the practice of reading fantasy and desire

(McElroy and Szeto 2018; Tadiar 2009). Doing so aligns with Arjun Appadurai’s

understanding that technoscapes cannot be understood without attending to imaginary

worlds and the irregularities that inform in their transits (2000). As he observes, work

outside of the confines of traditional social sciences is often requisite. For instance,

performing a “case study” in order to map the landing of digital nomads in Cluj

would not likely brush up against a study of racial banishment to the maidane. Likely

neither would consider the dreams and imaginaries of those willingly or unwillingly

transiting from one locale to the next, and how such visions materialize uneven

futures.

Deracination

60

The temporality of the digital nomad is enabled by liberal ontologies of

freedom tethered to property rights, yet seemingly exceeds Lockean and

heteronormative articulations of the free property-owning subject. More important to

the digital nomad is freedom of mobility—a freedom often paired with techno-

imperial speculative logics. As digital nomad Timothy Ferriss wrote in his 2009

bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New

Rich: “$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of

complete freedom it supposedly allows” (13). In his words, the capitalist fantasy of

property ownership has been displaced by techno-utopic desires of freedom. Yet this

falls apart when studying colonial histories. To expand and control space, and to

accumulate surplus value within it, colonial regimes have long privatized in the name

of freedom (Lowe 2015). Otherwise put, mobility has long enabled the settlement of

colonial regimes, materially, epistemologically, and ontologically.

Historically, racial appropriation has been one technology of such coloniality,

functioning through the deployment of reiterative stereotypes of the other,

strategically disciplining and domesticating alterity. While digital nomads capitalize

upon prior histories in Romania, they also appropriate the deracinated figure of “the

Gypsy.” Racial appropriation has long functioned by deploying reiterative stereotypes

of others, strategically deracinating, disciplining, and domesticating alterity. Jodi

Byrd observes that appropriation of Indigenous lives in the US emerged as a colonial

technology, in which Indigeneity became “a site through with the US empire orients

and replicates itself” (2011, xiii). Put otherwise, appropriating Indigenous—and

arguably also Romani—culture abets colonialism, much like land appropriation feeds

61

settler materiality (Asavei 2019). Critical of digital nomadism’s imperiality, Daniel

Kay offers:

Nomads like to talk about their enlightened lifestyles, but when it boils right

down to it, we’re just a new breed of hipster. We appropriate places and lead

trends, we go where life is cheap but hip, and we are a little bit in love with

our own lives we have the economic potential to destroy communities.

In this way, racial appropriation obviates Roma lifeworlds and contemporary realities.

As Mihaela Drăgan, a Roma actress and playwright, admonishes of Roma

personification in the arts and beyond: “We have an entire history of oppression and

silencing, so no non-Roma artist has any right to represent us without asking us first”

(quoted in Iancu 2017).

The appropriation that Drăgan critiques (and that digital Gypsies embody)

bears 19th-century Romantic Orientalist traces. This figure could transgress the

borders of modernity, the nation-state, and private property. From Britain’s George

Borrow to France’s Prosper Mérimée, from Germany’s Wilhelm Jensen to Russia’s

Alexander Pushkin, 19th-century authors prolifically crafted stories of the fantastical

wanderer. Frequently, these texts feature a white male protagonist who falls in love

with a sexualized “Gypsy woman.” Often, he attempts miscegenation and life as

Gypsy, but then realizes his dream’s impossibility, tragically murdering her. Most

frequently written by authors whose countries were engaged in colonial projects, “the

dark passionate Gypsy woman” and her death have been argued to allegorize

62

heteromasculine settler desire, as well as settler nostalgia for a pre-modernity (Lemon

2000, 37).

In Britain, 19th-century Gypsy novellas and poetry invoked a “national

nomadology” (Duncan 1998, 382), in which the state allegorized its territorial

expansion through the figure of the nomad. These works encode a nostalgic fantasy of

pre-industrial landscapes and disengagement from modern life, mapping an imperial,

open-range cartography. As the British John Clare characterized in his 1825 “The

Gipseys Song,” Gypsies fantastically “pay no rent nor tax to none / But live untythd

[sic] & free . . . In gipsey liberty” (1996, 52). This figure possesses the ability to

transverse frontiers, find shelter in the dwindling commons, and evade paying rent

and tax (resonant with contemporary sharing-economy endeavors), but also blends

into the bucolic landscape, conceptualizing a country unscathed by the mechanization

and boundedness of industrializing empire. Characterizing a nearby Gypsy camp,

Clare journaled, “I thought the gipseys camp by the green wood side a picturesque

and an adorning object to nature and I lovd [sic] the gipseys for the beautys [sic]

which they added to the landscape” (ibid., 1985). Here, by signifying a premodern

past and spatial transgression, the Gypsy stands in for British indigeneity and colonial

expansion, mapping a new and contradictory understanding of national space and

historicity.

For instance, the protagonist of British George Borrow’s 1851 Lavengro and

its 1857 sequel, The Romany Rye, is an Irish non-Roma scholar who performs the life

of a Gypsy tinker, travelling with a band of Romani people upon English pathways.

Borrow, a self-trained philologist, was fascinated by English Romanichals (Romani

63

people who migrated into Ireland and Britain as early as the 16th century) as well as

Irish Travellers (semi-nomadic people indigenous to Ireland, many of whom migrated

to England to escape British colonial and industrial forces). As the periphery to

England and the British empire was in constant flux during this time, Borrow’s text

recovers “an England deconstructed beyond ancestral Celts and Saxons, beyond a

primordial Britain, into Gypsy origins, fastidiously unmapped in to secret margins

and coverts, and the inner darkness of an unsettled, quasi-autistic self” (Duncan 1998,

390). Thus, Borrow’s Gypsies, as Indo-European migrants untouched by modernity,

are made the authentic carriers of Western civilization. While earlier British

disfigurations falsely ascribed Romani origins as Egypt, hence the vernacular

perversion “Gypsy,” Borrow also incorrectly ventures that Roma come from Rome—

a Western imperial birthplace. As he writes, “I should not wonder after all . . . that

these people had something to do with the founding of Rome. Rome, it is said, was

built by vagabonds” (1991, 107). Nomadized imperial Rome thus becomes the

centrifugal space of the timeless Gypsy, who, with a clairvoyant crystal-ball mythos,

time-travels a premodern imperial myth into the historic present. As Toby Sonneman

observes, “While romantic metaphors freeze the Gypsy image in the past, they

contradictorily allow them a special vision into the future as well” (1999, 130). Not

only are Gypsies free to wander beyond the spatial boundaries of empire, but also,

they are endowed with the ability to detach from normative temporality, remaining

fixed in the past while time-travelling into the future.

As a movable (racial) figuration, the Romantic Orientalist Gypsy maps

colonial desire—a desire that also transits between empires. For example, inspired by

64

Pushkin, in 1845, the French Prosper Mérimée composed Carmen, informed by

Borrow’s fabrications (Lemon 2000). In the words of Mérimée, “You asked me the

other day where I obtained my acquaintance with the dialect of the Gypsies. I got it

from Mr. Borrow; his book is one of the most curious which I have read” (qtd. in

Northup 1915, 143). Thus, the disfigured Gypsy depictions in Carmen were informed

by transnational myths. Like Pushkin’s poem and Jensen’s text, the heterosexual

desires for the untamed figure of Carmen in the poem represents colonial dreams; it

was right before the novella’s conception that first Napoleon, and then

Chateaubriand, occupied Spain, coinciding with Spain’s fading as a global power.

José Colmeiro suggests that, as Spain became a less threatening imperial rival, it

morphed into France’s submissive other, represented by the figure of the Gypsy

(2002, 129): “Because exorcising the exotic other is ultimately a way for European

bourgeois culture to exorcise its own demons,” he writes, “Carmen always must die”

(ibid, 128). Yet within the novella, there endures a distinction between the Spaniards

and Carmen/the Gypsies. This difference shows that even as Spain’s powers wane,

Spaniards remained connected to the European body, unlike Carmen.

Noteworthy here is that Carmen was created through a transnational fantasy

spread by white men dreaming from the hearts of empire. Might the diffusion of

digital nomadic fantasies be similarly operating, spread amongst Western

technologists by blog rather than poem and play? Might this dissemination concretize

techno-imperial imaginaries but also materialities? What has transformed between the

scripting of these 19th-century texts and digital nomad blog posts of today? Perhaps

there is something to be learned from the repeated murder of the sexualized and

65

racialized Gypsy and the imagined embodiment of the figure in contemporary

technoculture.

For instance, in the case of German Orientalism, which was informed by the

solidification of the German Empire in 1871, textual forms utilize the Gypsy to

consolidate German national identity. Wilhelm Jensen’s 1868 Die braune Erica, for

instance, is narrated by a restless German natural scientist longing for exotic alterity.

The text begins with the scientist desiring a rare plant, erica janthina, but as the text

progresses, it is revealed that this plant in fact symbolizes the true object of his

yearnings: A Gypsy woman who entices him to leave his settled life. Transfixed by

Erica’s androgynous, racialized body, the professor murmurs her name in scientific

language one night in his sleep, which she hears in her “natural language,” drawing

her to him. Upon falling in love with him, she leads him to the rare and beautiful

moor-dwelling heather that he had been searching for. When they arrive to the spot

where the heather grows, Erica is bitten by an adder and falls ill. The scientist

recognizes that despite his knowledge, he remains powerless to heal her. She accepts

her death—not because of the bite, but because of impossibilities of miscegenation.

When he reasserts his love for her, to his astonishment, she heals herself by applying

the antitheses of modern scientific orthodoxy—a wild, ecstatic, and unending dance,

which mysteriously cures her. Although they then marry and live a settled life on the

margin of German territory, she eventually leaves him—an expression of the

spontaneous and uncontrollable Gypsy spirit. This spirit is still lusted after by some

scientists today. While digital nomads fantasize similar spatiotemporal transgression,

there are important differences to be mapped.

66

Jensen does not posit Gypsies as possessing magic or chiromancy, but rather

as a foil to the lack of freedom in scientific knowledge. Gypsies are not a threat to

German ascendency, he infers, rendering them as dying and non-reproductive. As his

scientist discovers, because of their nomadic ways, Gypsies have developed hybrid

characteristics, like a maladapted species variant. Saul suggests that “they are a

diaspora paradoxically without a homeland, adapted neither to their alienation (the

Occident) nor their homeland (the Orient). They therefore cannot transmit their

inheritance” (2007, 117). In this sense, Jensen pathologizes Roma to make them both

intriguing and unthreatening to the longevity of the German Empire. Unlike Jensen,

digital nomads and global technoculture alike understand technoscience not lacking in

freedom, but saturated in it. The language of innovation and disruption ooze out of

intimate digital nomad meetups and packed TED talks. In these cases, nomadism is

both intriguing to and constitutive of techno-imperialism.

Also distinct from their 19th-century predecessors, digital nomads and

Gypsies have little reference for the human objects of their allegory. How many

digital nomads know much about the racial dispossession that Roma culture bears?

Not that Romantic Orientalists understood either, but there was at least a bit more

geographic proximity. For instance, in Alexander Pushkin’s famous 1824 Orientalist

poem “Tsygany (The Gypsies),” a non-Roma outlaw, Aleko, falls for a Gypsy

woman, Zemfira, and the freedom that she embodies. The narrative arc parallels

Jensen’s, as does its colonial influence. In his overlooked epilogue, Pushkin recounts

that his inspirations to become Gypsy stemmed from his own brief encounters with

Roma on the imperial frontier of newly acquired Moldovan lands. By cannoning and

67

cannibalizing Gypsy freedom, he charts imperial lust, racializing and sexualizing

Roma. While Pushkin’s interactions with Roma were minimal, they are likely still

more concrete than those of most digital nomads today. Thus, while the imperial

fantasy is reflected in the former, distance and abstraction have rendered particular

shifts. Today, the nomad is not something that one lusts after and kills; it is something

that one already is.

As a contradictory figure that both taunts settler desire yet remains fully

irresolvable through the heterosexual, racialized logics of imperial reproduction, the

Gypsy is repeatedly murdered within textual spaces—a death that represents the

materiality of colonial landgrabs, but also the taboo of Gypsy-becoming. From the

Gypsy’s death, different ghosts materialize. Today these specters reverberate within

techno-imperial ontologies of location and time independence. The crystal ball of

fantasy mythoi, coupled with perspicacious gaze of the extrasensory Gypsy, has

migrated along the perambulations of Romantic imaginary into the present.

Much as 19th-century writers allegorized imperial desires, digital nomads

allegorize techno-imperialism. As Orientalist tales emerged from the heart of empire,

so do those of today. In Kay’s words, “Digital nomads are unintentional pawns in a

new wave of economic imperialism” (2015). Yet it is not tech entrepreneurs today

lusting after and aspiring to become the nomad; they have already achieved this form,

or so they claim. In a sense, their “Gypsyism” is both ontological, and comes about

through practice. Digital nomadism thus highlights new geographies of dislocation

and blurriness.

68

Questions of Comparativity6

While nomadic fantasy is now being updated in the era of techno-imperialism,

leading to contexts of racial technocapitalism in cities such as Cluj, gentrification

scholarship often appears ill-equipped to map the upgrade. While, as a field,

gentrification studies importantly charts contemporary dislocations and inequalities, it

often fails to address the complex temporalities and fantasies upon with racial

dispossession rests. Here I suggest that to map double dispossession and its routes,

interdisciplinary approaches carves out new perspectives.

This is not to disregard gentrification studies and its wider field of urban

studies altogether. While I advocate for a connected approach to understand

Siliconization processes, there is much to be learnt from how questions of comparison

have animated debates in the social sciences over the last two decades. In recent

years, urban studies scholars have attempted to make sense of new interurban

connections across an emerging “world of cities” (Robinson 2011). Meanwhile,

postcolonial urbanists have made great headway in contesting historically Anglo-

American geographies of theory (Bhan 2019; Roy 2017), which center certain

Western European and US cities as the ground zero in comparative frameworks

(Atkinson and Bridge 2005; Schafran 2014; Slater 2017). Informed by trends in

postcolonial urban studies, new work has begun to center comparative work beyond a

privileged constellation of “global cities” (Caldeira 2016; Hart 2006; Mbembe and

Nuttall 2008), interrogating what Loretta Lees (2012) calls the “geography of

gentrification.”

Some of this work has begun to create nuanced accounts of how global flows

69

of capital come to matter through grounded histories and imaginaries, bolstering my

own approach to theorizing Siliconization in postsocialist Cluj. Yet I remain attentive

to a call made by Asher Ghertner that gentrification, as an analytic, may not pertain to

“much of the world” experiencing racial dispossession and evictions (2015). This, he

marks, is particularly true in the Global South and Global East, and in the in-between

space of postsocialist Eastern Europe.

Thinking from Siliconizing Cluj, here I share Ghertner’s concerns that the

conceptual dominance of gentrification theory has caused it to become a “regulating

fiction,” one that overwrites local understandings of racial/spatial politics (Robinson

2002). As Silicon Valley imperialism and its nomadic avatars mold Cluj in novel

ways, it is especially important to not only conceive of Siliconization through

Western analytics and processes alone. There are deep histories of racism upon which

contemporary forms of gentrification rest, locally but also transnationally. Ananya

Roy suggests that “seeing from the South” does not mean producing knowledge from

or about cities in the postcolonial world; instead, it means politicizing urban studies

by continuously remaking it from its social and spatial margins, by studying “the

crucible of racial capitalism on a global scale” (2018). Romania is not fully the South,

but neither is it fully the North, East, or West. What does it mean to think from its

interstitial geography, to see from it?

For one, seeing from Romania necessitates deep engagement with temporality

and dispossession. Time and displacement have everything to do with peripherality,

complex relationships to the West, and with what Roy describes as “racial

banishment.” Racial banishment, or processes in which subaltern people are pushed

70

to the far edges of urban life, invoke historically deep designations of racial

disposability. It is upon these that contemporary neoliberalism rests, but that urban

studies, as a field often is insufficient in understanding. Indeed, as recent work by

Norbert Petrovici et al. argues, to understand anti-Roma racism in gentrifying cities

such as Cluj, one must also attend to histories of Roma slavery (which lasted in

Romania until 1856), subsequent 19th-century practices of serfdom and debt

bondage, and modernization, industrialization, and agriculture – all of which fed

earlier yet constitutive desires of Western capital (2019, 3-4). Roma labored and lived

in pre-socialist Romania as doubly subjugated, racialized as surplus within a region

read as exploitable by the West. The heterogeneous 20th-century project of state

socialism in Romania in part sought to remedy this, and to combat the fascism of the

mid-20th century which, in addition to Jewish people, sought to exterminate Roma

(Achim 2004). While state socialism is now normatively read as pathologic, as a dark

stain in Romania’s quest for modernity, its demise led to revisionist histories of

racialized pre-socialist land and labor configurations.

As Roy suggests, a framework of racial banishment is useful in understanding

how evictions transpire, as well as how contemporary racial violence rests upon prior

forms, from that of slavery to that of colonization (2017, A3). In her words, “If

evictions are understood as an instantiation of racial banishment, then what is at stake

is how the banished/dispossessed subject enacts a politics of property and how such

struggles and claims inevitably entail a politics of personhood” (2017, A3). As such

suggests, too often, housing struggles against dispossession enact what Libby Porter

describes as “possessory politics,” in which ‘‘struggles against dispossession too

71

easily become struggles for possession” often through the assertion of rights (2014,

3). Rather than possessory politics, how might struggles against dispossession enact a

decolonial relationship to land, Roy asks.

Racial banishment expels people to what Roy terms the “city’s end,” or a zone

“constituted through mundane and individualized practices of property transactions

and negotiations rather than spectacular processes of primitive accumulation” (2017,

A3). By property transactions, she refers to the negotiations of space, ownership, and

land that occur both on and off official registers. Roy’s formulation here hints at the

limits of Harvey’s analytic of “accumulation by dispossession,” and perhaps more

broadly of traditional Marxist understandings of gentrification saturating today’s

urban studies. Instead, drawing upon scholars of racial capitalism, she invites other

analytics that understand race and coloniality not as simply corollary with class, but

as co-constitutive with it. For instance, once evicted to Pata Rât, residents are

stigmatized not only as Roma, but also as literally living upon waste. This is a process

of dispossession by the accumulation of racial property regimes.

Understanding accumulative dispossession aligns with a growing push to

move away from urban studies work that privileges class over race and 1960s-based

Western urban displacement theory more broadly (Bledsoe and Wright 2018; Byrd et

al. 2018). It also points towards the need to move beyond urban study’s disciplinary

reliance upon sociology. Sociological traditions, while well-critiqued for positivism

and the racist histories upon which they rest (Ferguson 2004), often maintain

temporal myopias. These make it difficult to understand racial banishment as situated

upon a thick palimpsest of racial capitalism. Clyde Woods, critical of social science

72

models that claim objectivity in their narrations of social death in US Black urban

spaces, hopes that research might offer “new epistemologies, theories, methods,

policies, programs, and plans” (2009, 448). For him, the social sciences are

insufficient in theorizing communities impacted by urban neoliberalism, a

phenomenon that sits upon a unique configuration of transatlantic slave trade and

imperial legacies. What might new epistemologies look like in postsocialist Cluj,

where deep local histories of anti-Roma racism collide with techno-imperial ones

allegorized by the digital nomad? Instead of centering formal case studies and

demographic statistics to determine what stage of gentrification an urban space might

be in, what if instead one conducted an urban study from the city’s end, reading the

space of the discard and debris of post-1989 techno-capitalism and Romantic

Orientalism alike? This is not to deny the importance of also studying globalizing

processes in comparative urban studies. Nor is it to deny that comparative studies are

important in analyzing how neoliberalism differently plays out in various postsocialist

contexts (Rofel 2019; Rofel and Moodie forthcoming). But is to supplement

comparative approaches with those of inter-connection, refusing false reductions and

simple metaphors.

A connective rather than comparative approach helps theorize Silicon Valley

imperialism, as well as what Matthew Hayes and Hila Zaban describe as transnational

gentrification—or the gentrifying effects of “lifestyle migrations” (2019). While the

gentrifying effects of digital nomadism in Cluj are real, they are discrepant within

specific geographies, informed by inimitable contexts. Put otherwise, local contexts

matter in scenarios of transnational gentrification. These are far from arbitrary,

73

having to do with prior property regimes, dispossessions, and technoscapes. Such

historical contexts are connected to, yet distinct from, those of the West. Thus, a

connected approach is aligned with work that studies technocultures from the South

and East that interact with Silicon Valley fantasies and effects, but that remain

irreducible to them (Amrute 2016; Chan 2013; Rai 2019; Švelch 2018). Unlike

studies of globalization that track migration from the North to the South (Benson

2015; Hayes 2014) and East, here I follow the trend of studies of digital nomads

entering the complex space of Eastern Europe. Aligned with work critical of 1990s

and 2000s cosmopolitanism and the neoliberal multiculturalism upon which it relied

(Calhoun 2002; Spivak 2003), here I more directly look at global technoculture.

Dispossession by Accumulation

While the deracinated digital nomad drags former colonial histories into the

Siliconizing present, in Cluj, it lands upon a palimpsest of anti-Roma racism. The

mass eviction on Coastei Street that landed residents in the garbage dump isn’t the

only case of IT and urban development being valorized at the expense of Cluj’s Roma

communities. Instances such as this continually racially banish Roma to the maidane

of postsocialist urban development. From the array of evictions in Mărăști

surrounding the “rehabilitation” of socialist-era factories, to the development

surrounding the tech company Endava near the Iulius Mall, it is clear that the

development of office buildings and new residential spaces is on the rise, as are

evictions.

While displacement sometimes transpires so that new development can be

74

built, sometimes they are less direct—yet nevertheless real. For instance, there has

been an ongoing eviction fight on Stephenson Street, right across from Liberty

Technology Park, a space that brags about being “the first technological park in

Romania, a park for creative ideas built in a revolutionary place designed to offer

exceptional growth and quality environment for companies in the IT&C and R&D

domains, all in one unique area both conceptually and architecturally” (Liberty 2018).

Hosting tech companies from the German SIEMANS to the Austrian Impact

Hub (the latter a well-regarded coworking space for digital nomads), as well as

Romania’s own Spherik Accelerator, Liberty Technology Park galvanizes

imaginaries of global IT success. Developed by the Swiss company Fribourg

Development, the space champions innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet it is hardly

new at all. Known as the Libertatea Furniture Factory during Communism, the

building itself goes back much earlier, to 1870, when a Viennese craftsman had built

pianos in the space. It was during Communism in the 1970s that residents moved in

across the street, paying formal rents. Over time, the residents, mostly Roma, grew

their families, and built informal structures.

All was going relatively smoothly until Libertatea became Liberty in 2013.

Suddenly, neighbors began calling the police on the Roma families who had been

living there for decades, complaining about the laundry that they were hanging on

their clotheslines outside. Washed as they were, the hanging clothes were rendered

too unsightly for technofuturity. Meanwhile, rumors arose that Liberty Technology

Park would soon be building a parking lot where the Roma were living.7 Clearly,

differential understandings of mobility are wrapped up in postsocialist modernity in

75

Romania, where tech is given freedom of migration, but whereas Roma communities

are forcibly pushed into the “exit zones of abandonment” (Tadiar 2007, 320).

To better understand this process, in 2016, members of Căși, myself included,

set out to create an interactive digital story-map, Dislocari: Rutele Evacuărilor spre

strada Cantonului (1996-2016) / Dislocations: Eviction Routes to Cantonului Street

(1996-2016). The map follows seven Roma residents, Ioanică, Leontina, Babi, Sandu,

Ligia, Katalin and Gelu, all of whom have been multiply displaced, and who now

reside in Pata Rât on Cantonului Street. There, in the maidane, 160 families live “fără

număr,” or without official addresses. In each location on the map, residents share

horror stories of banishment and gentrification. Some of their former homes have

been bulldozed and redeveloped into IT offices; some have been razed and are now

filled with a messy array of vegetation. For them, Cantonului Street is the end point

of a longue durée of dislocation.

In this section, I draw upon their stories to illustrate how racial banishment is

haunted by former racial histories, such as the lack of post-1856 reparations. After

slavery ended in Romania, numerous Roma migrated to Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and

Western Europe (Achim 2013, 122-124). While many Westerners read them as a dark

threat, others used them as inspiration for Orientalist tales of “Gypsy freedom.” Yet

for those who remained in Romania, national racism accumulated. By the dawn of the

20th century, most Roma still lacked property (Petrovici et al. 2019, 7). Positioned as

“dangerous” for “the nation,” they were soon targeted for extermination by the

Antonescu-led fascist regime. During this time, “nomadic” Roma were targeted for

elimination before sedentary people (Petcuţ 2004). Thus, nomadism itself became a

76

racial signifier.

Conversely, the Communist regime that afterwards came to power provided

numerous Roma with labor-intensive jobs in heavy industry and agriculture, enabling

upward social mobility (Petrovici et al. 2019, 7). Housing nationalization was part of

a state effort to reduce housing inequality and under-occupied shelter. As many as

241,068 dwellings were nationalized via Decree 92 (Florea and Dumitriu 2017, 193).

After 1965, a series of laws regulated landlord and tenant relations and housing

construction, interpreting housing as a field of consumption rather than production

(Vincze 2017). During the late 1970s and 1980s, numerous Roma were moved into

poor-quality nationalized buildings in city centers (Lancione 2018, 4). Thus, although

racism endured throughout socialism, at least housing was provided.

Everything changed after 1989. While laws enabled “sitting tenants” in

buildings constructed during socialism to purchase their state-owned homes (Chelcea

et al. 2015), things were quite different for tenants in nationalized properties, many of

whom were Roma. A series of property restitution laws were written in the name of

“transitional justice” (Law 112/1995 and its corrective Law 10/2001), which enabled

the redistribution of nationalized homes to pre-socialist heirs. Incentivized by pre-and

post-accession EU and Bretton Woods initiatives, restitution has been morally

justified by reading socialism as a dark stain in national history. Over 202,000 court

cases have been filed to date (Florea and Dumitriu 2017, 196).

During this transitional period, urban planning was transferred from the state

to local municipalities, the latter not provided incentive for social housing

development. While 30 percent of the country’s housing stock was nationalized

77

during socialism, less than two percent of housing is public today (Vincze 2017). In

Cluj, planning laws have changed at least sixteen times over the last thirty years, an

urban planner described over coffee one 2018 summer afternoon after a new eviction

in Mărăști. Often the city incorporates the private sector through the language of

“participation,” but this only incentivizes gentrification, he sighed. “The City Hall is

just using Pata Rât as its social housing; there is no incentive to provide anything

else.” And, because the Antonia-owning mayor maintains a 70 percent approval

rating, he can do as he pleases. Yet as Enikö Vincze—co-founder of Căși and co-

producer of Dislocari—notes, it was the prior mayor, Gheorghe Funar, who “created

a favourable space for capital accumulation in the hands of local entrepreneurs

without completely excluding foreigners” (Vincze 2017, 41). Between 1990 and

2004, Funar averted regulations, preparing “the ground for the further development of

Cluj – under neoliberal governance – as an entrepreneurial city or a ‘competitive

city’” (ibid., 42). City centers, once rendered derelict, have now become sites of IT

development, creative capital, and digital nomads, much to the horror of those

racially banished, as participants in Dislocari describe.

Ioanică, featured in Dislocari, lived on Turzii Street in the early 1990s, in a

former state-owned building. Numerous Roma families were legally living there,

most of whom were working in nearby factories, such as Clujana and Carbochim.

Ioanică, now middle-aged, had been a streetcleaner. But his building was not

maintained, and one day, he “woke up with the ceiling on the floor.” Rather than

repair the building, which today remains an empty lot, the city moved Ioanică and his

family to Croitorilor Street. The new apartment was nice, but soon, a man living in a

78

different city claimed it through restitution and evicted them without compensation.

Similarly, Ligia, also featured in Dislocari, received a restitution notice on Eroilor

Street in 2011, although her contract was good until 2014. She had been paying rent

on time, but the new owners wanted hundreds of euro a month, which she could not

afford. “So, they threw us out on the streets – we had no other choice,” she explains.

“I asked how is this possible, and they said it was because these were their houses,

and they wanted them back.”

Not only was housing privatized; so too were nationalized factories. In 1999

and 2000, the PSAL II act and national privatization strategy were adopted,

privatizing and outsourcing large state-owned companies, including computer

factories (Vincze 2017). Unbeknownst to many who now equate technological

modernity with the West, Romanian maintained a rich IT history of computation,

informatics, and cybernetics throughout socialism. After socialism, firms such as

IBM and Hewlett Packard rushed in, eager to take advantage of the specialized

workforce. Soon it was determined the land upon which factories sat was worth more

than the factories themselves. Numerous IT workers who I’ve spoken with lost their

jobs, as did workers from other privatized factories and laborers in heavy industry and

agriculture, many of whom were Roma.

As in post-industrial gentrifying Western cities (Zukin and Braslow 2011),

former Romanian factories have become havens for creative capital. However, former

residential units have also been transformed into offices. For instance, up the hill

from Cantonului is a new Roma community, forced to Pata Rât in 2010 after the

Finnish IT company Nokia speculated upon their Coastei Street homes to build an

79

office building. While Nokia soon after abandoned Cluj and migrated to China, where

new tax breaks awaited their “nomadic” branch, the displaced residents remain, to

date, stranded in the maidane. Meanwhile, the IT sector continues to be the largest

driver of office development in Romania, most of which is foreign. IT generated 44

percent of all leasing activity in 2017, indexing 80 percent annual growth (Colliers

International, 2018 18). While coworking spaces (preferred by digital nomads) only

take up 1 percent of office stock, 10 percent growth is anticipated over the next five

years (ibid., 18).

Ioanică’s former home now functions as a pharmacy, and the rest of the area

has been converted to IT buildings. As he questions:

I have no idea why more office buildings are built for companies, and not

apartments for people. Years have gone by, and now you wake up with so

many offices for rich people. The authorities care about one thing—to evict

people without legal documents so that they can reclaim buildings, pushing

people to the outskirts of the city.

While the IT buildings that Ioanică speaks of are not necessarily for digital nomads

alone, they do support the nomadism of Western tech companies to Cluj, a migration

that often is accompanied by an influx of digital nomads and tourists (as I

contextualize in the following section).

Ioanică’s narrative is one of many critical of post-1989 socioeconomic shifts.

Today, Romania maintains one of the EU’s highest poverty rates, with 37 percent of

80

its declining population of 19.6 million people experiencing poverty or social

exclusion (Eurostat 2017; World Bank 2018). According to the UN, between 2007

and 2015, after Syria, more people emigrated from Romania than any other nation

(Alexe 2018). While the number of wage earners in formal and informal sectors

decreased dramatically during socialism’s decline, the trend continued for the decades

after, mostly attributed to migration to the West. In Cluj, the number of employees in

2010 was 73 percent of what it had been in 1990 (Petrovici 2019, 41). Between 1991

and 2011, the ratio of those who remained versus those who emigrated was 13

percent for non-Roma, and 32 percent for Roma (ibid., 51), revealing racialized

precarity within the city.

But these statistics do not reveal the entire picture; the language of

percentages can never fully describe the day-to-day horrors of racial banishment. For

instance, after being evicted from Croitorilor, Ioanică moved to “the NATO block.”

His building was smoky and derelict, and the ground floor was full of garbage and

animals. “No one picked up the garbage because the people living here were Roma,”

he explains. “The children named this block NATO. It was back when our country

got into NATO, and we said, okay, this is the NATO block.” While entry into NATO

and the EU has been heralded by anticommunists as progress, in the NATO block,

residents lacked running water, electricity, and toilets. There, they formulated their

own critiques of EU accession and its false promises, most prominently by naming

the block NATO. “Instead of electricity, we used candles. We made fire with wood. It

was very smoky. Some people had jobs, some people were picking up garbage,

exactly as it is now,” Ioanică laments, referencing the informal labor that many in

81

Pata Rât partake in. Recalling Christmas, he recollects looking out from glassless

windows, enviously watching people in other buildings watch TV. “Some people had

cassette players, we had food, and used candles for light. Or we connected a small

bulb to the car battery.” All of this in the burgeoning Silicon Valley of Europe.

Because NATO residents had no formal contracts, the military police began

raiding the block. While many in Cluj presume that Roma reside in Pata Rât because

of poverty, Ioanică argues that instead he landed there because the City Hall never

offered his community guidance on how to apply for social housing. Today he

remains in Pata Rât with his two adolescent daughters, crammed into a sixteen-

square-meter barrack. Cantonului lacks a sewage system and only has two water

hydrants. Many people don’t have electricity. In 2015, the community was granted

two portable toilets, but before that, people had to use the train tracks. Meanwhile, the

City Hall refuses to pick up their garbage, citing technicalities. As Leontina, also

featured in Dislocari, bemoans:

They didn’t bring us toilets, they didn’t bring garbage containers, they didn’t

care about us. As if we were already dead, and they already put us under the

ground, and that’s it. We were put in the garbage dump and that’s it. It’s

worse for us than it is for the rats.

For Leontina and others in the maidane of urban renewal, postsocialist transition and

the influx of global capital has only meant heightened dispossession. That techno-

imperialism and its avatars fetishize nomadism simply adds insult to injury.

82

Techno-imperialism

While neoliberalism preyed upon and destroyed socialist-era property and

labor regimes, many middle-class Romanians nevertheless herald Western arrival,

disavowing the socialist past. As the CEO of a software company articulated to me in

the winter for 2017: Yes, 1989 was disastrous, but transition created new

opportunities. “The multinationals, they really ended up saving us,” he proffered,

suggesting that foreign investment was necessary for future development. While the

IT percentage of Romania’s GDP is low today, the rate is steadily rising (Colliers

International 2018, 7).

In recent years, Cluj’s IT industry, not known to hire Roma, has upsized.

According to a report by the Romanian IT recruitment agency, Brainspotting, the

industry boasts over 20,000 companies, over 110,000 professionals, and up to 8,500

annual graduates (2018, 1). In Cluj, one in three employees is a professional, and IT

is the second largest sector. Yet exploitation abounds, with over 100,000 people in

outsourcing (AT Kearny 2018, 14). As of 2016, foreign-owned companies generated

40 percent of the country’s GDP, with up to 90 percent of banking owned by foreign

capital (Ban 2016). According to Softech, a Cluj-based software development agency

that provides outsourcing, the US and the UK are the top IT outsourcing countries,

followed by Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, and then France (2017).

Of IT graduates in Cluj, Google is the top desired employer, followed by Emerson,

Endava, Bosch, and Microsoft (Brainspotting 2018, 6).

As Cluj becomes Siliconized, its residential market has topped Bucharest’s.

83

This process has been accompanied by an influx of Western tourists, some of whom

identify as digital nomads, many of whom become imbricated in processes of

gentrification. This correlates with Cócola-Gant’s argument (2018) that gentrifying

areas frequently become the objects of tourism consumption, so that gentrification

and touristification become entwined in a cyclical loop. It further aligns with

Gentile’s observation (2015, 139) that in Eastern European cities, gentrification was

induced first by the closing of functional gaps and then by the migration of wealthy

expat populations. Indeed, prior to 2008, “gentrifiers” in Romanian cities were mostly

tied to local scenarios; after, they became imbricated in international dynamics

(Chelcea et al. 2015, 127). These entangle with former racialized property histories.

Digital nomads often find Romania attractive because of its technological

prowess, Western firms, anticommunist values, English fluency, cheap housing, and

exploitable labor. Citing Romania’s fast internet alongside its emergent EU status, the

Nomad Capital website brags, “Romania is one of the top countries in Europe to find

outsourced labor on sites like Odesk, and you should be able to easily find relatively

qualified technical gurus for as little as several hundred dollars a month” (Henderson,

2013). The Transylvania Hostel (2018) ranks the best wi-fi in coffee shops for digital

nomads, describing Cluj as a “cheap destination for digital nomads who look for quiet

places where they can sneak-in with their laptops and work on their revolutionary

ideas.”

Like fast wi-fi, digital nomads celebrate the availability of Airbnb

accommodations and Uber transit. As one blogged, “The fact that we also landed a

kick-ass Airbnb rental obviously helped us feel at home” (Backpack Me, 2017). Thus,

84

the more Romania Siliconizes, the more desirable it becomes for digital nomads. As

has been observed in cities worldwide, the adoption of San Francisco startups Airbnb

and Uber often sparks tourism gentrification. The tour guide Lonely Planet ranked

Transylvania as the top “region” of 2016, promising: “Yes, horses and carts still

rumble through the wooded countryside, but they’ll soon share the roads with Uber

cabs ferrying visitors to chic Airbnb lodgings” (2015).

In Romania, Uber usage not only enforces Siliconization, but also racism. As

a French digital nomad developer blogs, “Before I arrived, I was told I would be

chased by beggars and if I survived, all my belongings would be stolen by thiefs. The

chief risk that you take by coming to Romania is to pay 5 times the real taxi fare.

Before you learn how to spot a honest taxi, better use Uber” [sic] (Morin 2016). This

fear of beggars and taxi drivers alike is rooted in classist and racist histories. Not only

are many drivers Roma, but also, I’ve also heard countless tales of people losing their

jobs after 1989, only to find refuge in taxi driving. For instance, Ion, trained to be an

engineer during socialism. The industry shrunk after 1989 and he could not find

work, igniting a deep depression. Today, Ion drives taxis by night, and watches

pirated movies by day, barely able to afford food. Uber entered Bucharest in 2015,

and Cluj in 2016. As of 2017, there were at least 250,000 users in the country

(Romania Insider 2017). In 2018, it launched the food delivery service Uber Eats.

There have been numerous protests by taxi drivers in Bucharest and Cluj, and

even lawsuits, as there have been worldwide, from Barcelona to San Francisco.

Nevertheless, Uber, itself a digital nomad of sorts, continues to prey upon tourists and

local aspirational culture of Western recognition. Meanwhile, Romania’s own taxi

85

app, Clever Taxi, which allows users to hail taxis with smartphones, was acquired by

a German company in 2017. When questioned, several digital nomads told me that

they prefer Uber to Clever Taxi, particularly as one can order rides from airports

without having to exchange currency. I’ve also heard Romanian developers laud its

Western origins and integration with Google Maps. This falls in line with a longer

postsocialist trajectory of using tourism and IT to affirm Western values. As Light

observes (2001, 1057-1058), beginning in mid-1990s, Romania began disavowing its

socialist past through tourism, “re-imaging” the country as “‘reborn’, ‘free’ and

having shaken off its totalitarian past.” As underground technoculture was also

endemic to both late socialism and postsocialist transition and often pathologized by

the West, the celebration of Western technological tourism reifies anticommunism

within and beyond Romania.

Romania’s portrayal as both safe and exotic, as freed from its aberrant past

and yet not fully Western, appeals to nomadic fantasy. During the winter of 2018, I

sat down in a fancy coffee shop with a German digital nomad, Fabian, who founded a

geospatial data firm in 2007 in Cluj, which has since expanded to San Francisco,

Detroit, Berlin, and China. As he sipped a green tea latte, he described Cluj’s appeal.

After college, he began dabbling in Berlin politics, but found it boring. He then

realized that the one thing that would never bore him was entrepreneurship. Attracted

to the “the wild east of Europe,” he considered Romania, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine. It

became a tossup between Cluj and Sofia, as he wanted to remain in the EU and as

Bucharest was “too political.” Cluj won because of its cheap Berlin flights. While his

employees didn’t earn much at first, now they make three times as much as doctors in

86

the region, competing within an international market. His international travels are

nonstop, and he even owns an apartment in San Francisco that he rarely visits. It’s a

great life, but he’s thinking of selling his share and starting something new soon, just

for fun.

While Fabian’s office sits in a new IT tower called The Office (formerly a

textiles factory), other digital nomads prefer cafes or coworking spaces. In the latter,

Western entrepreneurs often lead trainings on project acceleration and incubation,

while Western firms sponsor events such as Tech Fest, Techsylvania,

StartupTransilvania, TEDxCluj, sponsored by Western firms. There are at least

twenty-one coworking spaces in Romania today, mostly in Bucharest and Cluj.

In the summer of 2016, I attempted to attend a “mingler” party in the

coworking space, ClujHub, hoping to learn more. I already knew some of its nomads,

such as Victor, who travels to Berlin weekly. He believes that IT is big in Romania

because of foreign language skills, a sentiment often attributed to the influx of un-

dubbed US television in the 1990s. As television was restricted to state channels

during socialism (although people often pirated neighboring countries’ stations), after

1989, numerous people become obsessed with suddenly available programming, he

explained. There was also the IT manager Danny, who grew up in London and works

for a London-based company. With Brexit, he imagines nomads migrating from UK

to Silicon Valley companies. Andre, who works for a Cluj startup partnered with a

German Microsoft-funded company, builds smart home security devices. It is gaining

popularity in the West “with this new immigrant problem,” he explained, failing to

acknowledge that, especially since Romania’s 2007 EU accession, many of these

87

immigrants are Romanian Roma.

My roommate, curious about ClujHub, decided to attend the event with me.

But when we arrived, we were greeted by a 50 lei fee ($12 USD). While for

Westerners, this isn’t much, for my roommate, it was laughable. “On a normal Cluj

salary, that’s ridiculous. Most people could buy all the food that they needed for a

week on that. It’s extreme,” she scoffed. Thus, we changed course for Fabrica de

Pensule, a collective art space (once a paintbrush factory), which, over the last year,

has been partly displaced by tech companies, aligned with classic gentrification

teleology. Rather than a hefty fee, there we were greeted by a multimedia piece

curated by Claudiu Lazăr, “?uropa’|‘?urope.” The piece highlighted the hostility that

Eastern Europeans encounter when migrating west. This is only more extreme for

Roma, as was the case during the 19th century. Yet, when Westerners migrate

eastward, particularly digital nomads, they incite rather than face dispossession. This

process is haunted by former imperial trajectories, aligned with other postsocialist

technologies of installing Western dependence. Specifically, in times of postsocialist

techno-imperialism, dispossession of home and identity are collapsed as Western

nomads arrive.

As Lazăr’s work evidences, when Eastern Europeans migrate to the West,

they are treated as dangerous contaminants to Western purity, especially if they are

Roma. But when Western Europeans migrate to the East, they enact new forms of

transnational gentrification that then incites migration with dispossessive effects—

effects that lead many Romanians, particularly Roma, to move abroad and send

money back home. For instance, my friend Marian, Roma and fluent in over a dozen

88

languages but unable to find steady work in Bucharest due to racism, sat down with

me one sweltering August summer in an air-conditioned McDonalds café to describe

his recent visit to France. He had been traveling there often, not because he enjoys

traveling and the freedom that Romania’s EU accession offers, but because there are

camps on the outskirts of Paris where he can work and make a bit of money, even

though life there “is like hell,” lacking toilets, food, everything. And, there, he

describes, he encounters not only anti-Roma racism but also anti-Eastern

Europeanness, together miring him a bricolage of subhumanity. Being Romani from

Eastern Europe is in itself, he describes, “a double crime.” But he went because he

was able to take advantage of a racist French policy, whereby the government was

giving Roma 100 euro if they would return East. He made the trip a few times that

summer, but he was always relieved to return home. Although Roma, he, like

hundreds of people with whom I’ve shared cheap European airplane flights to and

from Bucharest, is far from a digital nomad or lifestyle migrant. Yet always scattered

on these plane rides are also tourists, entrepreneurs, and digital nomads. Unlike

Marian, they are driven by the mobility of IT capital rather than precarity, racism, and

sheer survival.

Thinking from the Maidane

In his studies of “sekend-hend” Eastern Europe, Wlad Godzich argues that

while Western imaginaries position the East as backwards, much of Western

modernity is in fact based upon prior Eastern histories (2014). And yet, in Eastern

Europe, the word “sekend-hend” is a distorted and imported term that when spoken

89

with Eastern European accents seems to ventriloquize foreign speech. However, “this

voice does have authenticity, and the accent it proffers has primacy over the content

of what it utters” (2014, 15). Otherwise put, Western Europe, and arguably also

Silicon Valley, are second-hand projects, which sit upon Eastern European originary

pasts. In the case of double dispossession, anti-Roma racism within 19th-century

Romania led to numerous Roma residents migrating Western Europe. There, they

encountered new forms of racism, including Gypsy fetishization. State socialism

sought mitigate interwar fascism in the mid-20th century. The demise of state

socialism has led to the reinterpretation of pre-socialist anti-Roma racism once more,

justified in the name of transitional justice. Socialism’s demise has also incited the

Western devouring of socialist-era IT infrastructure and techno-urban histories.

Today, the arrival of the digital nomad in Cluj cannibalizes and enhances these

histories in one fell swoop. Continuing, Godzich writes, “This may seem to be a

meager consolation in a landscape of such desolation, but recycling requires that one

wanders around dumps” (2014, 15). Disinterring the allegorical and material roots of

digital nomadism from the dumps of the maidane sheds light on the constitution of

double dispossession, as well as the formation of “sekend-hend” Europe.

Yet, as Clyde Woods argues, there is more to do than simply render autopsies

of racialized and subjugated lifeworlds (2002). In the wastelands of Pata Rât, there is

more at work than simply survival alone. By only recording stories of death and

dispossession, one obviates other futures, other iterations of leftover time that

threaten the dominant end-of-history order. From work being done by Căși Sociale

Acum to the analysis being produced in Cantonului barracks, other futures being

90

dreamt, all aimed to produce housing justice. On one hand, these degentrify the

normative accounts of postsocialist end-of-times as being inevitable. On the other,

they point to the need for epistemologies crafted outside of traditional urban studies.

On the surface, it might appear that Cluj is indeed the new Silicon Valley of

Europe, gentrifying much like its Western counterpart. While of course there are

parallels, with rents rising and racialized evictions accumulating, there is more at

work than simply replication. As the interconnected phenomena of racial banishment

and appropriation reveals, racial histories haunt the materialities and allegories of

techno-urban transformation. By reading across fields and narratives, and by thinking

from the maidane, interconnection begins to crystalize. Digital nomadism is entwined

with Orientalist onto-epistemologies built upon Roma slavery, failed reparations, and

forced migration. Further, the Siliconization of Cluj rests upon prior techno-urban

infrastructure and histories. Might it be a form of epistemological gentrification to

only read Cluj as Silicon Valley, or to simply read material and allegorical

dispossession as isolated phenomena? Rather, by reading across narratives, allegories,

and routes of eviction and geoarbitrage alike, techno-imperialism and its Orientalist

hauntings surface. These specters point to the need for a connected approach to

theorizing material and allegorical dispossessions across time, space, and genre.

91

Chapter 2: Corrupting Techno-normativity in Postsocialist Romania: Queering Code and Computers

Everyone is watching. It’s dark—it’s always dark—and Black is trying to

escape unnoticed from the repressive regime that is socialist Romania. Black, a nuts

and bolts factory worker, has to deceive guards, smuggle goods, and manipulate

people—all without getting caught in the cold, industrial never-ending dystopia.

Lonely, Black, a video game character in the Bucharest-based, Japanese-backed Sand

Sailor Studio’s 2014 game Black the Fall, only has one friend—an abandoned robot.

On screen, Black, a humanoid perhaps more machine than human himself, is hard to

make out against rows of identical figures, either bicycling to power the machine that

was state-socialism or listening to the censored Radio Free Europe. As he sneaks past

a sea of coffins arranged in a half-collapsing building, an overseer blocks a forgotten

room filled with old portraits, a vestige from the good old pre-socialist days when

Bucharest was the “Little Paris of the East” (also a time of fascism). But to the game

designers, writing code in postsocialist Romania—now known as the “Silicon Valley

of Europe”—this aristocratic era is a fond historical memory, of a time when kings

still meant something—a time before socialism and its aftermaths corrupted promises

of Western enlightenment; a time before the country was run by corrupt parties

politicians likened in popular media (and in the game) to socialist zombie-robots,

refusing to vacate what should be the clean, capitalist, and Siliconized present. In this

way, postsocialist techno-urban aspirations of “Siliconization,” exemplified by the

game, merge with those of pre-socialist “Parisization,” erasing the fact that during

socialism and the post-1989 transitional period, Romania was a rich space of

92

technological development—above and below ground. In this way, the

anticommunist game, appealing to a postsocialist generation, mobilizes contemporary

digital technology to disavow the “illiberalism” of socialist technology and its corrupt

aftermaths. Like other technocapitalist creations of postsocialist Romania, the game

thus attempts to redo the 1989 revolution, this time to get it right, this time to finally

delete socialism and its corrupt ghosts once and for all.

Here I don’t explicitly focus on robots or games per se in Romania, at least

not in a traditional sense. Rather, here I am invested in the games that humans play

with technology to differentially manifest anticommunist Siliconized futures on one

hand, and corrupt futurity on the other. As I suggest, since 1989, Romania has

experienced a growth of Silicon Valley imperialism, a postsocialist temporal structure

in which post-Cold War Silicon Valley’s futurity hinges upon the reproduction of

Siliconized fantasies in intimate and global spaces alike. This has transformed techno-

urban horizons drastically, which are now peppered with tall glass IT towers and co-

working spaces replete with Google-like interiors, and Western sci-fi Astrofuturist

imagery. Rents have gone up around tech centers, with corresponding racialized

evictions, much like in California’s Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, mass urban protests

known as the Light Revolution, largely supported by tech corporations and workers,

use Western technology to disavow the socialist past and gain Western recognition.

These protests too featured at the end of Black the Fall, aligning the game with a

ballooning Silicon aspirational movement.

However, there are technological pasts and presents that either do things

unrecognizable to Silicon Valley imperialism, or that Silicon Valley imperialism

93

attempts to delete by coding them as illiberal and unproductive. Yet infrastructurally,

as I go on to explore, Silicon Valley imperialism depends upon these corrupt

materialities for its own reproduction. In Romania, Western firms today sit upon the

ruins of socialist-era factories, many of which were part of socialism’s own techno-

futurism. Western-endorsed startups coopt local hackers and developers, taking

advantage of the technological prowess and skills of those who came of age during

the latter socialist period and its transitional aftermaths.

Socialist Romania after all excelled at hardware production, hacking Western

computer models to manufacture the most third-generation computers in the Eastern

bloc after the Soviet Union, along with an array of fourth-generation microprocessor

computers in the 1980s. During this time, and continuing into the post-1989

transitional period, underground practices of cabling, software piracy, game creation,

and hacking proliferated, as it did in other Eastern bloc spaces, such as Yugoslavia,

Czechoslovakia, and Poland (Jakić 2014; Wasiak 2014). To game the Iron Curtain

was to spatiotemporally corrupt it, to fragment normative temporal and spatial

boundaries. Such cyber deviancy was only amplified after 1989, when hacking and

bootlegging became more widespread than state-sanctioned practices (Alberts and

Oldenziel 2014).

Generally this form of gaming espoused what is called șmecherie

(cunningness or a sort of street-smart cleverness), along with a desire of gaming,

hacking, and corrupting the spatiotemporality of Iron (now Silicon) Curtain

(Fiscutean 2018; Švelch 2018). Often (but not only) associated with Roma manele

(Roma popular music), șmecherie implies knowing how to work a space or situation

94

to one’s benefit. While it might incite the accumulation of wealth (sometimes by

corrupting the rules of the game), șmecherie is also a performative, playful coding act

and a form of postsocialist excess, bestowing value unrecognizable to the state and to

Silicon Valley imperialism alike. While Western IT firms pathologize “dark” șmecher

practices, at the same time, they coopt them to expand.

In postsocialist Romania, Black’s robot friend is coded as clumsy, tired, and

dark, nothing like the Siliconized clean, light technology of today, manufactured upon

the ghosts of socialist factories and infrastructure. In this way, Silicon Valley

imperialism, an updated version of Radio Free Europe, reproduces its future through

techno-normativity, straightening temporally corrupt, șmecher cyberculture, while

deleting memory of it. Techno-normativity inculcates what Elizabeth Freeman

describes as “chrono-normativity” (2010), or the temporality that capitalism inheres

to reproduce its futurity. It also builds upon what Liviu Chelcea and Oana Druță

articulate as “zombie socialism” (2016), an anticommunist genre of historicity that

understands socialism to be simultaneously aberrant and abhorrent. As Shannon

Woodcock suggests, “Just as the homosexual is born into his/her closet and needs to

develop in order to ‘come out’ into the world of heterosexuals, the ‘post-socialist’

East exists in Western capitalist discourse in order for EUrope to benevolently bestow

recognition on its other” (2011, 66). This framework of recognition understands that

to escape its socialist-era ghosts, Eastern Europe must become techno-normative.

This can be seen in the cooptation and erasure of socialist and transitional technology,

as well as in contemporary mass anticorruption “Light Revolution” urban protests

that have galvanized urban centers since 2017 in Romania. These, supported by

95

Western corporations from IT firms and McDonalds alike, utilize Western technology

and light to disavow the socialist past and claim an enlightened space in the Western

geopolitical body (Atanasoski and McElroy 2018). Techno-normativity thus indexes

postsocialist aspirations of becoming Western in ways that also fuel the labor and

resource needs of the West. Because technology informed the project of socialism

and its collapse (Petrovzsky and Țichindeleanu 2011), it is worth examining in the

postsocialist Siliconized present—techno-normative and otherwise.

While corruption in computer programming and data storage refers to

processes in which errors and malware alike compromise data integrity and lead to

system crashes, in postsocialist contexts, techno-normativity codes socialism and its

remnants as corrupt. In this way, corruption and its divergent meanings can be

understood as what Jaroslav Švelch describes as a “coding act,” or a way of writing

code that refuses “the rules or fictions of the games” and the “runtime behavior of a

program” (2018, xli)? By foregrounding computer corruption and its șmecher coding

acts, here I posture that it might be possible to queer and corrupt techno-normative

fictions of corruption.8 How might reading techno-fictions unrecognizable to Silicon

Valley imperialism corrupt the techno-normativity it inheres?

To engage in such a queer reading practice, both ethnographic and speculative

work is requisite. By speculative, I draw upon Aimee Bahng’s theorization that while

finance capitalism depends upon practices of extrapolation and fiction-writing,

speculation can also be queered to create anti-capitalist futures. As she suggests,

“Pursuing alternative technocultural origin myths also means rejecting the progress

narrative that Enlightenment thought encourages” (2018, 11). Turning to postsocialist

96

contexts, one might ask, what other techno-futures might manifest if we are to take

seriously the socialist robot of Black the Fall, along with its strange kinship to its

humanoid friend? How might methods such as what Saidiya Hartman describes as

“critical fabulation”—or the writing of speculative histories marked by violence and

institutions on one hand, but also “desire and the want of something better”—remap

postsocialist technoscapes (2018, 470)?

By queering, and aligned with queer theory, here I diverge from reading

queerness as a simple identarian code or sexuality descriptive (Barad 2015), but

rather as a field of inquiry and set of interpretative strategies that helps elucidate the

relationality of socialist and transitional technoculture. Aligned with Bogdan Popa’s

theorization of queer postsocialist politics, queerness here “emerges from desires that

constitute a surplus in relation to the normal circuit of exchange value” (2019, 30). In

other words, queering illuminates the excess of cyber and computational coding acts

that transpired outside official state histories and Cold War victory narratives.

Queering thus means reading the socialist computers, robots, and cables that haunt the

present, perverting techno-normative imaginaries of postsocialist “common time” of

Silicon Valley (Starosta 2014, 2005). Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora offer,

“Postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order

even as its revolutionary antithesis” (2018, 141). Continuing, “Resisting the

revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work

through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present” (ibid., 141). Siliconization, like

the common time of history’s end, can thereby be read as a heteronormative event,

one that reproduces teleological dreams of Western becoming in ways that fuel the

97

labor and resource needs of the West, and one that gentrifies socialist-era techno

imaginaries and their corrupt postsocialist reverberations. As I question, how can

queering refuse to engage in socialist nostalgics, while at the same time offer a much-

needed lens through which one can understand techno-entanglements of the present?

In what follows, I queer postsocialist technoculture by scavenging through the

corrupted past, digging out dismembered computer parts, salvaging discarded

magazines, hacking together futures past and yet-to-come unrecognizable by, and yet

intimate with, Silicon Valley imperialism. By way of beginning, I introduce a

speculative future past written against that of Black the Fall techno-normativity.

Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă (History Will Not Repeat Itself), led by artists Veda Popovici

and Mircea Nicolea, and implemented by dozens of collaborators, weaves together a

future past from Romania’s transitional period that imagines technocultural worlds

that could have, and still may, transpire. I use this a point of departure in exploring

socialist and postsocialist technology, drawing upon archival and ethnographic

material, ushering them into a new possible future coded against Silicon Valley

imperialism and its techno-normative means of reproduction.

Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă

There are about a dozen of us hovering around a table in the Macaz Bar

Cooperative in downtown Bucharest on Moșilor Street, which over the last year has

been marked by an array of evictions, mostly targeting Roma communities. Veda

Popovici and Mircea Nicolae are convening one of several workshops in which we, as

participants, are tasked with devising objects that can be used to depict a future past

98

from Romania’s transitional period—one that could have happened, but that never

did. As the artists describe their project:

From darkness to light, from authoritarianism to freedom, from communism

to capitalism—these form the greatest narrative of the recent period. This

narrative casts collective experiences of solidarity and resistance in the

footnote of history. The dreams and projections of the 1990s and 2000s, the

post-revolutionary desires of a truly better world for all, remain buried under

charity, minerals, and migration. In Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă, these are returning

fragments and imperfections in the narrations of possible but lost worlds:

feminist trade unions, radical movements, collaborative economic projects,

information campaigns on dangers of the new capitalism (translated by

author).

Those of us at the table are familiar with the counterfactual stories that Popovici and

Nicolae have already crafted. For instance, there is the Coop Bank and public

information campaign entitled “Money is Not Made Through Work.” There is the

Union of Women Workers of Romania, who occupied their Suveica factory who now

own their own homes in Floarea Albă. There are the small shop owners at the Obor

and Vitan Markets, unscathed by the “mallification” that marks 2018 gentrifying

topographies. And the list goes on, filled with places and stories that could have been,

but that never were. One of the tasks of this project is to imagine these pasts, and to

dream them into different futures yet-to-come. As Alexis Lothian puts it in her

99

formulating of queer speculative futures, “The end of the world as we know it seems

continually imminent. Yet we live in the debris of many ended worlds, whose

inhabitants continue to live on” (2018, 2).

At the table, we are discussing what new objects we as participants might

create to materialize these other worlds. A few of us are excited about one future past

space in particular: the building on Calea Victoriei that in the mid-1990s

headquartered both the Roma rights organization, Romania Criss, and the LGBT

organization, Accept. Then, these two groups did indeed share space, forging what

could have been rich and sustained space of queer of color critique, had liberal NGO-

ization not severed them. But in Popovici and Nicolae’s future past, the two groups

continue to grow together and stave off capitalism, building international solidarities

and a Free School. At the workshop, we opt to draft a syllabus for the school.

Amongst other topics, hacking should be included in the curriculum. As one

participant offers, “Yes, we all learned computer programming during the 1990s, and

before that during socialism. And everyone hacked or knew someone who did. What

would have happened if hacking could have really kept Romania from getting

swallowed up by global capital?” Indeed, how could hacking and șmecher cyber

practices have prevented Silicon Valley from corrupting postsocialism? Why is it

instead that socialist technology and its aftermaths are read as corrupt?

Socialism and its Computers

Technological development was a crucial part of the state socialist project in

Romania, as it was in other Eastern bloc states. The figure of engineer itself was

100

understood as a cyborg of sorts, intended to propel the country into socialist

modernity, while socialist projects of electrification and industrialization spread

throughout the region. These projects did not inhere assimilatory drives into liberal

democracy, but rather the sustenance of a dialectical post-Enlightenment future, one

premised upon industrialization, urbanization, and centralization (Buck-Morss 2002).

As with other industries, official computer development was techno-normative in

relationship to the socialist state (which endeavored to use computers to centralize

industry, agriculture, and informatics), yet deviant in relationship to the West. During

this time, Romania successfully produced and exported numerous third and fourth

generation computers, largely by hacking and altering Western models. Having

spoken with computer scientists involved in these early endeavors today, nostalgia

and wistfulness characterize their memories, as does a form of paternalism for having

been the first or best at this or that. However, and more my focus here, less normative

IT worlds coevolved with official ones, hiding in the closet of official state history.

Following World War II, Stalin led the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc in

abstaining from Western trade, forming a socialist economic bloc, COMECON.

Based on mass industrialization, its goal was to eliminate reliance upon capitalist

machinery and products, and to limit economic dependence upon the West.

Industrialization, it was theorized, would also help the East recover from war.

Romania, then led by Gheorghiu-Dej, supported the plan, and as archives have since

revealed, he even claimed authorship of it, indicative of a form of paternalism

saturating national state history, technopolitical and otherwise (Dragomir 2012).

However, within a decade of the plan’s implementations, tensions grew

101

between the two countries. Moscow had intended for different COMECON countries

to have economic specialties, and Romania’s was slated as agrarian per its

longstanding peasant culture (Mureșan 2008). But with futurist visions of

technological growth and collectivization as precondition for industrialization,

Romania, rather than exist only as a food supplier to Soviet states, wanted to develop

technology. Soon, people were moved into cities undergoing rapid development,

while dormitories were built around new factories to house workers, the cyborgs of

the socialist future.

Romania’s first computers were part of an early socialist generation made

both to further mathematical and scientific inquiry, and to and to improve techno-

urban centralization. In Cluj, the first computers, robots of a different variety, were

aimed at improving sugar beet harvesting and optimizing public transportation

timetables (Farkas et al. 1963; Popoviciu 1969). Scientists at the Atomic Physics

Institute built Romania’s first computer in 1957, CIFA-1, making Romania the

eleventh country to manufacture a computer. Having visited the Institute in Măgurele,

a suburb outside of Bucharest—which today is in the process of creating Europe’s

largest laser, ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure)—it is clear that pride of past

technological advances runs deep. Similar immodesty is written on the walls of other

computer and mathematical institutes and buildings throughout the country,

particularly in Cluj and Timişoara. After the development of CIFA-1, an array of

models erupted, from MARICA, DACICC, and CET in Cluj to MECIPT in

Timişoara. Over twenty-five official computer models were crafted during socialism,

as Romania became the second largest producer of electronic computing systems in

102

the Communist bloc after the Soviet Union, exporting machines to China,

Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, Syria, Egypt, and Iran (Baltac 2015).

Vasile Baltac, one of the early makers of the MICEPT models, today is a

professor at Bucharest’s National School of Political Science and Public

Administration, and the CEO/cofounder of two software companies, Softnet.ro and

Novatech SRL. These are headquartered in the same building on Calea Floreasca that

centralized national computer research during socialism. On one cold winter day in

2017, he met with me there, eager to share photographs and memories of times past,

when he and his colleagues led some of the country’s most valorized technological

missions. Unlike software company headquarters in Silicon Valley, the building is old

and cracked, worn but filled with technological futures past and present, entangled in

concrete and cables.

It was in 1967, he recounted, that the government launched a program to

promote computational industrial development and to introduce computers into the

national economy, forming a Governmental Committee for Computers and Data

Processing. Although third-generation computers were imported from the West,

significantly, Romania successfully produced and exported its own. This was done by

hacking and altering Western models. France offered Romania the license for its

IRIS-50 medium-sized computers, a model that Romanians soon hacked, creating

FELIX C-256. Baltac led the operation of creating an entire FELIX family, birthing

numerous models and over 650 mainframes, including many HCs (home computers).

While Ceauşescu determined HCs to contravene Party ideology, their manufacturing

continued. While HCs such as PRAE and CoBra were manufactured as part of state

103

projects, others, as I go on to explore, were developed underground, largely based on

cloning the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. These had to be plugged into TV monitors and

used audio cassette tapes as external program memory.

Bogdan is a retro-computing expert now trying to create a computer museum

in Cluj. One rainy afternoon, we sat down in an old bar, and he told me about how

every Thursday midnight during socialism, the TV station would stop broadcasting

normal programming and would instead emit code. It sounded like a fax machine, he

grinned. Bogdan’s brother would fight the family for use of the television during this

time, so that he could record the code on one of his floppy disks plugged into his

cloned computer. He would then spend the week decoding it. “It wasn’t some fancy

key to some government secret—nothing like that. Sometimes it was just information

about the airport, sometimes an announcement from a big shop, sometimes games and

free software. This how we began to learn BASIC programming,” he smiled. His

friends would come over to play the games, often meaning ten adolescents would

hover around one computer, to the chagrin of his parents. “We were so bored with the

limited TV station, and so this was something new and fun.”

Despite extended support by the Communist regime for computer

development, it was less enthusiastic about actual robots. At first, robotics

development was supported, as it was thought that robots would abet rapid

industrialization. Robotics workshops were established in universities, but after the

Party leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, visited one in Timișoara, he became worried that

industrial robots might displace the working class. Soon after, the word “robot” was

banished from the press (Kovacs 1991, 942). Nevertheless, the research continued,

104

supported by local authorities who decided to turn their heads. These researchers

were just one of many dissident actors in the underground of a maverick state. Was

the robot of Black the Fall an underground entity made despite the socialist state, and

if so, what was its relationship with its friend, Black?

Perverting the Perverse

Donna Haraway suggests, “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that

they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to

mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to

their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (1987, 293). Indeed, the cyborgs

of state-socialism were informed by the conditions of the state, as well as the West,

yet at the same time, they defied both. The state itself was read as deviant through

Cold War optics, and even by the Soviet Union. But the state and the idea of the state

were still there, relevant and yet at times, “inessential.” As I continue to explore, the

most interesting human-non-human interactions during socialism and its aftermaths

transpired beneath the surface of official state history, queering techno-normativity

and paternalism together.

Tibi, who now lives in the US, where he works in a software company, grew

up in Bucharest in the 1980s, where he learned programming from his cloned

Spectrum. The ZX Spectrum was built in Britain in 1982, and soon copied and

produced throughout Eastern Europe. The 8-bit HC ran a BASIC interpreter, making

it relatively easy to use as long as you had a TV set and an audiocassette for storage.

“If you pressed ‘i’ it would be ‘if,’ ‘e’ it would be ‘else,’ so you could type BASIC

105

pretty quickly,” he recounts. Most people that he knew with computers had Spectrum

clones. While the Party cloned the Spectrum to create the CoBra, these were

enormously expensive and difficult to obtain, fomenting an underground of DIY

hardware assemblage. University students in Bucharest’s Polytechnic University soon

began to clone Spectrums themselves, producing an array of machines, all unique and

made from spare and smuggled parts. “We always joked that more CoBras were built

in the dormitories than in the factory” a programmer friend joked.

While Tibi doesn’t remember where his family bought their computer, he does

recall it being an unusual purchase. At the time CoBras cost 35,000 lei, about half the

price of a Dacia car. Black market clones were much cheaper (and therefore popular),

sometimes going for 12,000 lei. Tibi does remember having to buy Russian

audiocassette tapes so that he could store information and load programs, since the

computer lacked storage. Underground markets emerged, with people trading

cassettes and parts. Rather than playing games like his peers, Tibi used these to learn

software and new programming languages. “I remember that at one point I was using

my computer to read a very precise scale that was measuring the input of a drop of

water to show how it evaporates – even with 32k of memory,” he reminisced. Tibi

joined his high school’s computer club, unofficially organized by two professors who

were into computers—a physics professor and a Russian language professor. There

was one computer class taught in his school, but it was very simple, based on

FORTRAN, a fast and efficient computer language developed by IBM in the 1950s.

“You can still see traces of the past today,” he explained, referencing how

FORTRAN and BASIC are still used. Specters from Spectrum times.

106

Back in Bucharest, Polytechnic University students engendered all sorts of

deviant computer practices. Mihai Moldovanu, cofounder and lead Linux developer

of TFM Group Software, did. As part of the Polytechnic cloning world, he and other

students leveraged resources to buy Cobra motherboards, and then began to build

computers upon them, creating an entire supply chain. Sometimes parts were

scrapped from other computers; sometimes they were flown in with the help of airline

pilots. Dealers would come to campus with electronics, parts, LEDs, and resistors,

selling them at bulk to the students. Often, they would meet at a nearby campus pub.

There was even this guy they called “The American” who sold transistors right in

front of legitimate electronics stores, somehow getting away with it. “He might sell

you a bag of 100 LEDs and only three of them would work.” Soon, everyone at the

university had these șmecher homemade machines, each made with about 2,000

solder joints and a sea of wires.

While much of Mihai’s knowledge was developed through practice, he also

remembers watching a Bulgarian TV show that taught circuit building. He hacked it

by using an analog antenna, often skipping school to do so. He would study

everything aired, quickly taking notes since circuit schematics were only broadcast

for a couple of seconds. Then he would close his eyes and draw based on memory.

About 90 percent of the Romanian computer industry was built on reverse

engineering, he explained. Mihai recalled that of the computers that they produced

(probably more than were produced at the factory), no two were ever the same. Even

their cases varied depending upon what was available on the black market. And the

keyboards all contained keys polished one-at-a-time with a nail file, upon which

107

professional-looking paper letters and numbers were placed, thanks to a friend’s

paper business. The purpose was to learn and to have fun, șmecherie, never to

capitalize.

Might these cloned computers, derived from British and Romanian parts alike,

some stolen, some smuggled – also be some of the robots of the socialist period,

thereby queering anticommunist narratives that see socialist robots simply as poor

benign accomplices to Black the Fall dystopics? This Spectrum hybrid, a perversion

to the West, was not produced by the West, nor by the socialist state. Its past is

muddled and unattached to pure origin tales. Its futurity depended upon illicit

connections, disassembled motherboards, and forbidden border crossings. And,

further queering techno-normative reproduction tales, it gave rise to new postsocialist

underground futures.

Casting Mimicry

Sitting around the table at the Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă workshop, participants

began recounting stories of 1990s techno perversity. As some speculated, what if

these could have staved off the dawn of post-1989 technocapitalism? “Can it still,”

someone asked. “Is it too late?” questioned another. After all, postsocialist

neoliberalism dramatically disrupted Romanian technoculture, leading to the

disintegration of state projects. Everyday life too was recast through transition, from

media consumption practices to employment opportunities and lack thereof. In this

way, transition led to new forms of techno-normativity but also techno-deviancy at

the same time.

108

The December 1989 revolution which paved the way for neoliberalism in

Romania, the first revolution televised, was crafted by technology, and materialized

different technological effects. The Romanian national television station aired the

revolution, which was then broadcast across the world with various interpretations. In

the US, coverage focused on the horrors of Communism, highlighting images of a

mass grave in Timișoara now believed to have been staged for the media using bodies

from a local cemetery (Borcila 2009, 69). By representing Romania as a victim site,

Western media mapped a future of salvific intervention. But while the US maintained

that the grave was real, it suggested that the revolution was staged, led by a new

generation of Communists, thereby doubly justifying future US intervention in the

name of anti-corruption (Petrovszky and Țichindeleanu 2011, 34). Meanwhile, some

Romanians, glued to TVs airing the revolution and subsequent the execution of

Ceaușescu, were imbued with a new political subjectivity of having participated in

both. As a cooperative member of the Macaz Bar Coop, where Popovici and Nicolae

are leading the Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă workshop, and who was only a child during the

revolution explained, “There is still the trauma—we were all accomplices in murder.

We all signed a social contract that there is no going back. Whatever came next, we

had to embrace it, because we destroyed the past, or the legitimating element of it.

The past crumbled.”

Ceaușescu’s execution wasn’t actually live; there was a 15-minute delay in its

screening (Ujică 2010). A sense of delay became the dominant narrative that both the

West and Romania subsumed about Romania. Western media inculcation was one

purported antidote. When asked what she remembers most about transition, my

109

roommate described, “People just started watching TV. Western TV. Or Romanian

TV modeled on Western programming. But either way, TV was the truth teller.” She

recounts watching MTV with her parents throughout the 1990s for six hours a day.

Even though MTV has since “gone to shit,” her mother, now in her 60s, still

watches it daily, and has a television in every room of her home. Meanwhile, her

father, is obsessed with bootlegging. During the 1990s, he would go to the flea

market to buy black market videos every weekend, which he would then arrange

alphabetically in his home library. What is now the famous McDonalds in Piața Uniri

(the first “Mac” to planted after socialism, in 1995) was once steeped in bootleg CD

stands. Because many of the programs were un-subtitled, and because people were

fascinated with the new world that had just opened up to them, viewers learned

English quickly, and also some Spanish due to the abundance of telenovelas. In this

way, the post-Cold War spectral encounter between the East and the West became an

asymmetrical geographic interplay. McKenzie Wark observes, “The territory of the

East was maintained as an image of the other within the map of the West; the map of

the West was the other put into covert circulation in the territory of the East” (1994,

65). And yet, the circulation of the West in the East produced complex frictions and

effects.

For instance, English proficiency, along with the abundance of socialist-

trained informatics workers, became an inspiration for Western firms looking to

launch a new Eastern European outsourcing market post-1989. This offered

opportunities to some, but most people I’ve spoken with recount having lost rather

than gained employment in the 1990s, or of having pieced together an array of

110

undignified gigs. For instance, Monica, who worked as a highly-trained engineer

throughout the 80s, lost her job after transition. She found a new one as an

accountant, but the salary was too small, pummeling her into a deep depression. And

she is no exception. In 1988, computer production was valued at 10 billion lei, but in

1991, it sunk to 3 billion, with hardware production ceasing (Docaș 2015). Florin,

founder of an IT company, recounts the number of IT workers dropping rapidly, and a

Canadian firm extracting a whole team of 200 people. As factories crumbled, malls

appeared. As small markets vanished, Mega Image and Carrefour hypermarkets

manifested. Gambling venues too erupted in the 1990s, in chain venues such as

MaxBet scattered throughout neighborhoods. Between 2003 and 2014, the number of

slot machines quadrupled in Romania to 62,000. In 2016, it was estimated that of

Romania’s 20 million people, at least 98,000 are “problem gamblers,” though experts

suggest the number is really in the hundreds of thousands (Meseșan 2016). Today, no

longer do people wait in queues, lines that many now recount as places of sociality;

instead, they gamble earnings in the betting rooms, trying to win at a capitalist game

rigged against them (O’Neill 2016).

Claudiu, who works for a multinational in Sema Park adjacent to the

Polytechnic University, has a father who had studied cybernetics at the university. His

father had a good job during socialism, which he lost after his position was made

obsolete by Western firms. He began driving taxis and working odd jobs, and now

feels as if his entire education has been made obsolete. Claudiu studied economics in

the UK in the 2000s, and then managed to come back and get a job for Hewlett

Packard. Now he does technical writing for a different firm in Sema Park. Unlike

111

Pipera, where computers were manufactured during socialism, Sema Park was an

agricultural industrial center. But today it lives as a strange mixture of high-tech glass

towers and old socialist-era warehouses. There are still canteens that serve the same

traditional Romanian food that they served to socialist agricultural workers, but now

they’ve rebranded their exteriors with brick and glass, having changed their names to

hipster-sounding titles, like “Cactus.” “They’re just doing what they have to keep

up,” Claudiu tells me, pointing out a large empty lot behind one of them that reminds

him of the spaciousness and heavy industrial ruins of the 1990s. “This is what

everything was like in the 90s—I miss it.” He used to come here in high school to go

clubbing, back when it was cheap, and they didn’t check IDs. There are also new food

trucks that have come in, mostly selling burgers and coffee, and a fancy café inside

the glass building where he works that oddly resembles a tropical botanical garden.

There’s also a sports center and bowling alley, IDM, with a logo mimicking IBM’s.

But it’s been there for a while, and, having bowled there myself with Macaz members

on a New Year’s retreat, I can attest that is far from bourgeois inside.

Later that evening, back in my apartment having returned from Sema Park, I

see a sticker attached to a closet placed by my roommate, reading, “When You Think

You’re Adidas, But You’re Really Just Adibas.” In Romanian, adidas simply means

“sneakers,” regardless of the brand. An anarchist, feminist theater company in

Chișinău, Moldova, known as the Spălătorie (“Laundry”), crafted the Adidas/Adibas

sticker. As I recalled being told at the Spălătorie when I first visited it in the midst of

an earlier bone-chilling winter, there has always been a simultaneous adoration and

abhorrence for Western brands. Their taboo during socialism created a fetish, but

112

now, in postsocialist times, members of Macaz and the Spălătorie alike understand

Western capitalism as a colonial force, one that instigates forms of self-colonization

by instantiating ongoing desires of Western recognition. IDM and Adibas will never

be IBM nor Adidas, yet the desire of inversing that pesky, corrupt character lingers

on.

Across the city from IDM is Pipera, the neighborhood of socialist-era

computing and FELIX manufacturing. After 1989, FELIX found itself in a messy

relationship with the actual IBM, erasing FELIX’s own hardware production. And

yet, IBM’s strategy failed, at least at first, as they had to compete with a new

underground market in which Romanians would assemble their own computers with

uncertified IT parts from Hong Kong to Taiwan in small garages. Tibi recalls, “In the

early 1990s, I was interested in building my own PC. It was cheaper. If you wanted to

do an upgrade with some parts, it was cheaper to build your own. I was building for a

couple of friends, even my brother.” These were desktops, so it was easy, he explains.

Tibi also remembers one of the first commercials to be released on Romanian

television after 1989. It was a FELIX computer commercial, one whose slogan went

viral: “V-am prins, vrăjitoarelor! (I caught you, witches!)” It was everywhere,” he

remembers. “Everyone knew it.” But what might it actually mean? People have

different interpretations of the satiric commercial, which featured a man walking into

a cave filled with witches preparing some potion for him. Were the witches FELIX

makers crafting socialist-era machines now liberated by capitalism, or were they

Americans now trapping corrupt Romanian computer-makers with their end-of-

history alchemy? Then again, as witches are gendered and racialized in popular

113

imaginaries in Romania, often invoking anti-Roma racism, might socialism itself be

coded as Roma-affiliated in this commercial, suggesting that FELIX was now on a

new Western journey away from its corrupt past (although, unknowingly, it was in

fact on a journey of predation by the West). But on the other hand, perhaps the

commercial acted as a prescient satire from the future, aware that that despite the

West’s bests efforts, Romanian computer perversion would continue to flourish—

though maybe in internet cafes and computer labs instead of caves.

Not even capitalism’s best efforts could undo Romanian cyber deviancy. Of

course, the West did try to erase Romania’s technological proficiency, and according

to its own narratives, it was victorious. It immediately crafted the narrative of a

backwards Romania needing technological salvation, one that over time, people

began to believe. Anna Tsing warns that speculative enterprises such as software

companies must always sell possibility of economic growth to investors before

actualization. “The more spectacular the conjuring, the more possible an investment

frenzy,” she suggests (2000, 118). Not only companies, but also regions must conjure

themselves as spaces for future investment in order to attract investment, she writes.

Utterances of Romania’s claim to having “become” Europe’s Silicon Valley are in

this way conjuring acts built on mimicry speculation rather than reflections of reality.

For instance, in 1990, a New York Times article proclaimed Romania

technologically backwards (Greenhouse 1990). According to a specialist based out of

the Institute for Comparative Economic Studies in Vienna, Romania was exactly “20

years behind,” as it still counted inventory and performed accounting manually

(ibid.). In 1995, Malcolm Penn of the British thinktank, Future Horizons, gave a talk

114

in Romania, encouraging Romanians to embrace a new market opportunity, while

also warning of some potential “Key Issues” in a PowerPoint slide, namely: “Lack Of

Capitalist Culture/Work Ethic; and Jealousy Risk When Sense Of Envy—Overtakes

Sense Of Entrepreneurialship” (1995, 11). In other words, Penn suggested that unless

Romanians catch up to capitalist ontologies, failure will abound—failure linked to an

infantile Communist ethos. As he continued in his PowerPoint: “Capitalism Is Not

Perfect But, Like It Or Not, That Is The Way Of The World. The Challenge Is To

Learn How To Exploit Its Benefits & Make It Work To Your Advantage. . . Just Like

Everyone Else Has To!” (1995, 12). Thus, in one fell swoop, Penn erased the history

of FELIX, positioning Romania as technologically behind due to its anti-capitalist

history. In 2003, FELIX was privatized by special state order. Five days later, a board

of directors with no computer background was established. The next year, roughly

half of the factory’s shares were auctioned and divided into joint stocks. Some went

bankrupt in 2006, selling land and buildings to real estate speculators who determined

the 20,000 square meters upon which the factory sat worth more than the fabrica

itself.

Today, hackathons in coworking spaces still resemble Penn’s slideshow,

inculcating Romanian tech workers with ideas that to compete and become better

entrepreneurs, they must adopt Western ways. I have sat in on countless of these

sessions, and often after a while, the whole thing becomes dizzying. A German

CyberGhost entrepreneur delivers talks on the benefits of “geoarbitrage” in Romania,

thanks to its cheap living costs, outsourcing, and technological prowess (as I describe

in Chapter 1). “My company could never have succeeded had I gone to Silicon

115

Valley,” he exclaims. Romania is where it’s at. Then Uber’s Pierre-Dimitri Gore-

Coty arrives to Romania for the first time and delivers a talk on the need to innovate

old industries in Bucharest’s TechHub to a room packed full of nicely dressed

workers. “Bus stops are too analogue!” he excitingly exclaims, promoting Uber’s new

driverless cars. Pizza is delivered and free coffee aroma seeps through the air. Two

days later, there’s TechFest in Cluj and an array of talks on the Internet of Things

(IoT).

One man from a small Cluj-Berlin startup markets their new security IoT

device, one that he boasts is becoming especially popular in Western Europe with

“this new immigrant problem.” No one in the room seems to mind, or to consider that

Romanians are often perceived by the West as part of this problem. He goes on about

how the device can detect the gender of voices, so that if you are a woman and ask to

watch a move, it will go through “chick-flick and rom-com” options first. Applause.

But the security device, while produced in Romania, only recognizes English and

German. More artisanal coffee. The code is not open source as they must run a

business after all. I could be in San Francisco. But I’m in Cluj, in a new IT building,

“The Office.” Sitting upon the ruins of a socialist-era textiles factory, one would be

hard pressed to imagine the former mode of production in the now glimmering glass

building. Rents have gone up around it, and the food court and wine bar underneath

boast prices comparable with Silicon Valley.

Yet, the salaries of “Office” IT workers are not comparable with those of

Silicon Valley. But still, as Maria, an IT worker and self-described digital nomad

from Brăila living in Cluj and working for a Florida startup, describes, “Sure, we’re

116

paid less, but I’m still making more than any of my friends, and I can travel to these

digital nomad meetups and work from home.” But others are not so optimistic.

Alexandra, who once was a programmer, now can’t find a job nor achieve freelancer

status. Instead, she bemoans that IT companies are so behind the West in

understanding proper management. She is now looking to leave the country and find a

job in Western Europe, “anywhere but here.” Andrei, on the other hand likes the

stability his job working for a Silicon Valley company while living in Bucharest with

his friends, but he’s forced to work night shifts answering calls, and finds his moods

altered due to lack of sleep. Many people that I’ve spoken with in tech articulate

aspirations of working for bigger and better Silicon Valley companies, either in or

beyond Romania. As Megan Moodie writes, aspiration and imaginaries of upward

mobility, when studied ethnographically, often reveal how particular groups of people

weather “transition from an era of state-backed protections to an era of contract

labor” (2015, 17). For instance, Oracle, now in Pipera, nearby FELIX’s ghosts and

witches, seems to be the end goal for those who wish to remain in Bucharest. And in

Cluj, the objective is entrepreneurship, or maybe working for Endava, NTT Data, or

one of the other large companies. Yet tech workers that I’ve spoken with in large

companies articulate boredom at work, interpellating it just as only a job, attempting

to sneak in YouTube videos on breaks between monotonous tasks.

Specters of Spectrum

But the story doesn’t end here. Despite the best spells cast by capitalism, the

specters of the Spectrum clone haunt the present. This endurance, bypassed in

117

Siliconized narrative structures, continues to bolster, touch, and pervert zombie

socialist historiography. While IBM 2.0 was wreaking havoc in FELIX worlds, Tibi,

Mihai, and others continued to produce machines underground. Meanwhile an array

of computer magazines began circulating, all saturated with computer construction

manuals, software installation guidelines, code, and instructions in how to set up

satellites and LAN networks. From backtracking methods to articles on virtual reality,

techno-skepticism, and the phenomena of the hacker, magazines such as Open

Tehnologia Informației and PC World Romania flourished in the 1990s, fomenting

new IT counterpublics.

Florentin, who now is part of an independent free and open source software

and hardware project, Ceata, remembers learning to program and build computers

from the magazine Extreme PC, which got big in the 2000s and had online chatrooms

and support. Gabi, who learned how to code in school during a once-a-week, hour-

long class, remembers learning more relevant coding in these chatrooms. “Some of

the chatrooms are still active today,” she told me, “and you can still buy the

magazines online.” Meanwhile, apartments began setting up “decoders” to steal HBO

otherwise not available on their networks. “It was this funny little device that we all

had on the back of our televisions,” Alexandra remembers. If it broke, everyone knew

someone who would come and set up another, she told me one day, as we were

walking through a slightly overgrown park, headed back to the city center from a

Jewish senior home on the outskirts of Bucharest where we had been volunteering.

Other volunteers walking with us chimed in, remembering their decoders,

unsuccessfully trying to recall when then appeared and disappeared.

118

In 2014, Romania’s piracy rate was twice that of the EU at 60 percent, but in

1996 it was as high at 86 percent (Fiscutean 2014b). At the time, there was little

legislation protecting intellectual property, and the software market developed

accordingly. MS-DOS was the first pirated operating system in the 1990s, and then

OS/2, and later Windows, via Russia. At first, pirated software was not sold for profit,

which only began after inflation skyrocketed to 151 percent in 1997. Nevertheless,

software piracy was understood as education, building collective knowledge about

coding, algorithms, and open source products. Raj, from Râmnicu Vâlcea, or

“Hackerville,” remembers a zillion internet cafes springing up overnight. “It was hard

to get into them because they were so crowded,” he recalls. One of his neighbors

invented a VPN to mask IP addresses, and soon everyone started paying him for

VPNs so that they could hack from home. Raj remembers that often people would

make money fast from some internet hack and then use the money to pay for personal

manele concerts.

Counterpublics such as these soon began stringing internet throughout cities

on telephone poles, building the backbones of what is now Europe’s fastest

connection. This wasn’t the experimental project of state socialism intended to

improve central planning and economics; it was more of an organic decentralized

chaos intended to connect and share information, music, movies, tools, games, and

software amongst neighbors. Because internet dial-up packages were expensive at

first, and given the intense poverty that post-transition incited, generally, one person

would buy internet and then share or sell it to people in their block, wiring cables

haphazardly. As people had already been pirating satellite stations and were relatively

119

familiar with cabling, and as the magazines and chatrooms taught wiring techniques,

stringing cables across apartments and blocks of flats “was really no big deal,” I’ve

been told. Today still, telephone poles, from Cluj to Bucharest, are adorned in a

massive array of cables from the early 2000s era, some still working, some just there

on because they are too woven in to detach. The first time I pointed these out to a

friend visiting from the US, she asked if it was an art installation. And yet, as people

are always quick to remind me, the cabling today is nothing compared to the early

2000s, when it became common place for telephone poles to crash with the weight of

the cables, sometimes smashing cars parked beneath.

Alex helped set up one of the first networks in Bucharest in the 1990s. He had

seen his friends get plugged in to an existent network, and for him, it felt like his

entire life was about finding his way into one. His first time plugging in was like

“Christmas on steroids.” He had to purchase 40 meters of cable, which cost more than

he thought he could afford. But he saved, bought the cables, and then he was in. Soon

he started connecting neighbors. It was not uncommon to see cables of 70 to 80

meters and even 100, and such a distance, the cable weight became tricky. “It was

important to tie the cables to something solid,” he recounts, “like a radiator or firmer

pipe.” Everything was connected, and everything was precarious. Back then, “If your

mother vacuumed your computer, it could destroy the entire block’s network.” By

2003, he and his neighborhood friends had 80 to 100 users, and the network itself had

become “an organism that could not be controlled.” There were too many

interconnected nodes to know how many existed, or even where they were.

“Anything could expand the network in any direction desired.” Rareș, who was part

120

of the same network, recounts how their crew was well appreciated, with neighbors

gifting them cakes, cookies, and drinks, and dinner invitations. In this way, their work

wove together new analogue and digital communities, the latter often taking place on

early social media such as Meet and hi5. Soon Rareș and Alex began trips to Regie,

where Bucharest dorm students live, bringing empty hard drives. They would all sit

down and trade things, mostly manele and porn, and then bring it back to their

neighborhood to share. Alex recollects, “At that time, digital wealth was equivalent to

material wealth in terms of șmecherie”

Bogdan, who is in the midst of establishing a computer museum in Cluj, also

set up one of these networks in Cluj, connecting 24 people in his block. It was 2004,

and he had no internet cable, but somehow managed to use TV cable. “We all had

486 computers then, the new generation,” he told me. They had 16 kilobytes, used

routers, and it took five minutes to transfer a picture. You could never shut down your

computer once it was connected because you didn’t want to be bumped off. Setting

up this network was just one of his many DIY computer projects of the era. For him,

it all began in grade school when he would cut class and hide in the attack. There, he

discovered an old broken MII8B computer from the 1970s. Curious, he came back the

next day with a screwdriver. It was the late 90s, and there was no Google or Yahoo to

tell him how to fix it. But there were internet cafes in Mărăști filled with smoke

where he could ask questions. So, he began. Two years later, he won a math

competition and was awarded an old 486 computer that the National Television

station was throwing out. Eventually, he saved up money from his job at the local

newspaper to buy the parts to make it work and to install Windows. Hardware

121

became cheaper after 2002, he remembers, and it became easier to pirate the

operating system. Soon began to visit the flea market at Oser every weekend to pick

up older models being thrown out to fix them. Before long, his entire room was filled

up with computers. It was then that he began to build his neighborhood network,

eager to share and pirate new software for his growing computer collection.

But then, in 2010, the internet monolith RDS (Romania Data Systems) came

in, promising better and faster services, fiber optics even. Threatened by independent

networks and wanting to avoid competition, they began bribing people to sell their

networks, Bogdan reminisces. Sometimes they would threaten building

administrators, citing technical illegalities about the size or length of the wire.

Sometimes they just cut cables. “Everything went to hell.” Eventually, Bogdan’s

network came down, but still, there’s one cable left that no one could remove. “No

one says anything about it – I think people think it’s part of a spy network!” he

laughs. Today, Bogdan maintains a day job with Amazon, but spends most of his time

finding discarded and broken computers, cleaning and repairing them, turning them

into specters of their former selves. Some he finds in industrial waste yards, some in

the dusty shelves and basements of academic institutions, some in Oser. Now hos

whole house, as well as his mother’s, is now filled with refurbished machines.

Despite the destructive power of the large network monopolies, Romania’s

fast internet exists today (the fastest in Europe) not because of Western salvation, but

because of the queer palimpsest upon which Siliconization rests. Of course,

capitalism absorbs all that it can, and these transitional networks were swallowed up,

but their infrastructure is still there, weighting down telephone poles and bolstering

122

the wires now controlled by larger firms. Florentin from Ceata also remembers RDS

sweeping in, in part because his own father worked from RomTelecom (now Telecom

and connected to T-Mobile, based in Germany). RomTelecom and C-Zone were

bought up by RDS while, UPC, another large corporation, bought up Astrid. Florentin

got his first computer in 2000 before this consolidation, but he never got use an

independent network because he lived in this part of Drumul Taberei in Bucharest

where he couldn’t seem to find one, maybe because everyone there was old. There

was a really cool one in Crângași and even some neighborhood network wars around

its control, he remembers. Florentin wanted to set one up too, but he had no money to

buy cables. His father had some extra telephone cables, so he tried to stretch them and

use them in a ramshackle way, but it never worked. He recollects how slow the dial-

up was in his block between 10pm and 2am, as this was when all the downloading

and uploading would begin. He had wanted to start assembling computers that could

operate outside of Microsoft operating systems, but part of the problem was that to

download other operating systems you needed a fast connection. Microsoft had also

set up an update on his computer so that he couldn’t download certain things—a

techno-imperial move.

Maybe it was this that got Florentin thinking about the importance of moving

away from Silicon Valley and private software. He began selling computers in 2004,

but they still were still based on proprietary software. Now finally he’s selling

computers again with Ceata, but this time with free hardware and software. This

allows the best kind of encryption, he told me. “It’s really the only way that you can

maintain security—to have the right hardware.” Today, Florentin now creates new

123

machines from spare parts, much like he and others did a decade earlier. But his goal

today is to ensure that the computers he makes aren’t hacked by Silicon Valley-driven

data colonization and spying. Yet on the other side of the world, post-Cold War

Silicon Valley maintains fear of “dangerous” and “illiberal” Romanian, Russian, and

Eastern European hackers and more broadly. And this imaginary becomes

internalized in Romania, from Black the Fall to Light Revolution protests and

beyond.

Romanian and other Eastern European hackers excelled at virus fabrication in

the 1990s. In Bulgaria, Todor Todorov, who also went by Commander Tosh,

designed the global Virus Exchange bulletin board so that virus geeks could trade

information. In Romania, most viruses at first were written just to do something cool,

something șmecher. Costin, who now runs Kaspersky Lab’s Analyst Summit,

recounts the days in which viruses that would simply show images or play songs.

Some embedded secret messages and puzzles, for instance the Tequila virus, which

simply revealed a Mandelbrot fractal on a user’s screen. Sometimes virus writers

would steel users’ data, forcing users to win games to retrieve their data back. There

was Vienna.648, and Cascade, the latter encrypted to disable reverse engineering.

Some were more political, just as Jabber, which would make it so that if a user typed

the name of Romania’s president at the time, Iliescu, the word jos (down with) would

follow (Fiscutean 2015). An early iteration of Dark the Fall, perhaps. But unlike

today, “No malware was written for financial gain, unlike nowadays, when most of

the malware is written for some kind of financial profit,” Costin remembers.

For instance, there was Lari from the ED011 lab at the Polytechnic University,

124

who simply wanted to write a “+” character on the European Organization for

Nuclear Research website address (Fiscutean 2018). He carefully wrote malware that

could propagate on Unix operating systems without detection. The code itself would

change after every replication, and after the job was done, the server would become

irrelevant and the worm would completely erase itself. His hacking developed, and

eventually hitting the US—first UCLA and then the Pentagon. His exploits were

developed out of curiosity and not maliciousness, he recalls. Meanwhile, his

colleagues, some known as “Ender,” “Vampi,” “Zombie,” would stay up for nights in

a row writing malware, fork bombs, and more. Eventually some hacked into NASA

and executing commands on army.mil, accessing supercomputers from the US to

Japan. As Costin remembers, back then, 99 percent of all hacks were just kids playing

around and challenging each other. Today, it’s just the opposite; 99 percent are

executed by governments and corporations, he posits. Meanwhile, Costin’s own work

has been bought out by Microsoft, which attempts to pervert his perversion itself.

Countless former hackers have recounted the same story—antivirus firms

buying up their work in order to capitalize upon it, much like RDS bought up

Bogdan’s cables. In these strange Silicon landscapes, one might wonder, who is the

virus and who is the zombie? Who is the witch and who has been hexed? Might the

witches themselves be embracing a form of șmecherie, one that corrupts Silicon

Valley imperialism and its end-of-history coding acts? Postsocialist hackers and

retrocomputing experts, from those who created viruses to those still profiting from

antivirus technologies, are all part of or touching upon what Bogdan describes as the

“X86 Generation”—a reference to Intel’s microprocessor and the generation wedged

125

between Gen X and Millennials—those who were born predigital but who created the

contexts for digital times to become what they are. Bogdan argues that it is these

people who have created complex, entangled, and often contradictory Romanian

technospaces. “Unlike what everyone thinks, it’s not Silicon Valley—it’s these

people that are leading the current tech wave,” he told me firmly. Silicon Valley may,

like RDS and antivirus tech firms, absorb existent infrastructure, from computer

factories to wires to malware. But whether set up by the state or by underground tech

networks, it wasn’t Silicon Valley that established these materialities. Thus, while

Silicon Valley imperialism today rests upon, touches, and corrupts socialist era

computing worlds, it remains bolstered by cyber undergrounds and their transitions.

And yet, other than the relatively small amount of explicitly anti-capitalist tech

projects, such as Ceata, computer hackers and programmers in Romania today seem

to have become largely absorbed by Silicon Valley imperialism. How can

counterfactual historiography and objects, such as the hacking courses designed by

the Free School of Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă, corrupt and queer techno-normative means

of reproduction?

Space Invaders

In Black the Fall, even after “the wall” comes down in what is understood to

be 1989, blackness persists. According to game creator, Cristian Diaconescu, this is

due to the dark specters of corrupt socialism. Thus if one makes it to the end of the

game, a photo of Diaconescu’s design team at an anticorruption “Light Revolution”

protest appears. In the spring of 2018, during one of these protests and also a far right

126

homophobic “Normality” demonstration, a third march crawled through Bucharest’s

streets. For the first time, the annual LBGT pride parade was granted access to march

through Bucharest’s city center, rather than being confined to urban outskirts. Also,

for the second year in a row, IBM, Google, and Accenture pinkwashed the event, not

unlike their pride pinkwashing in California’s Silicon Valley.

However, this year, a small group of anti-capitalist protestors, many of whom

were part of the Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă workshop, were prepared. They came

equipped with large banners against pinkwashing, racial capitalism, and fascism.

“Fuck Off Google” stickers were brought from a solidarity action in Berlin, where at

the time, Google was attempting to establish a campus. Activists replicated the

messaging during the Cluj pride that took place a week later, along with a “LGBT and

Space Invaders Against Gentrification” sign. Referencing the 1978 Cold War video

game, the sign overtly corrupted the Cold War 2.0 to reclaim robotic space invaders.

Unsurprisingly, liberal technocapitalists chastised the queer dissidents in both

cities, reminding them that Romania was now finally free from socialism. How dare

they corrupt that! When a photo of one of the anti-pinkwashing banners began

circling in a forum monitored by the LGBT NGO Accept, rather than defending it, the

organization just deleted the image. It was “too far of a step to take, the anti-Google

stuff,” someone from the organization later told me. A far step away from the

speculative future woven by Istorie (Nu) Se Repetă participants, who imagined how

Accept and Romani Criss worked together to corrupt Silicon Valley imperialism.

José Esteban Muñoz writes, “To want something else, to want beside and

beyond the matrix of social controls that is our life in late Capitalism, is to participate

127

in this other form of desiring. Thus, the connection between queerness and utopia is

most salient at this precise point–the desire for a new world despite an

emotional/world situation that attempts to render such desiring impossible” (2009,

278). Queerness, as both perversion to capitalism and desire for something else, is not

confined to spaces of explicitly queer activism alone. Postsocialist analytics

themselves are a queering of techno-normative end-of-time imaginaries. But queering

postsocialism and corrupting techno-normativity is not simply recasting socialist

nostalgia either. Unattached to origin stories and their paternalisms, queer corruption

looks to other utopias, futures past and present technologically entangled. Futures

committed to speculative worlds beyond Silicon Valley imperialism and the zombie

socialism that it techno-normatively reproduces. Futures that corrupt anticommunist

fictions in order to code something new.

128

Chapter 3: The Light Revolution, Blood Gold, and the New Times of IKEA: Impossible Spaces of Dissent in the Dawn of Techno-fascism

This chapter examines postsocialism as an emerging theoretical concept to

assess the contestations of liberalism in post-Cold War spaces of protest. Rather than

fall into stereotypical invocations of Eastern Europe as a historical and geopolitical

site from which to theorize the prefiguration of illiberalism and totalitarianism in a

post-Brexit and post-Trump-era West, I instead ask, what can Eastern European

postsocialist politics of protest, development, and renewal teach about the perils of

liberalism? By attending to political action and imaginaries in postsocialist Romania,

here I highlight how the reorganization of public and private space undergirds the

conditions of forgetting that enable postsocialist disaster capitalism, which speaks not

only about Eastern European specificity, but also more broadly about the

contradictions of Euro-American liberalism made apparent in its recent crises. By

disaster capitalism, I refer how neoliberal policy, privatization, austerity, and

deregulation are differentially deployed in particular aftermaths, in this case the

aftermath of state socialism (Klein 2007; Moodie and Rofel forthcoming).

In the wake of Trump, the West increasingly looks to the East for illiberal

prefiguration, and at anti-corruption and anticommunist protests as a roadmap for

taking down corrupt politicians. As I argue here, while the West might better find

“darkness” in its own Silicon Valley backyard, there remains much to learn in the

East about the violence that liberalism produces, particularly in the realms of public

protest and private property. For instance, in 2013, the antimining Save Roșia

129

Montană protests emerged, in which tens of thousands of Romanians took to

the streets in protest of extractive mineral technologies being enacted by a Canadian

gold mining company—a controversy that I elaborate upon in detail in this chapter.

As I show, the Canadian company, rather than lodge a counter-protest against the

protestors, began justifying its presence as antidote to “dirty” and “backwards”

socialist-era state mining practices. While initially anti-capitalist in nature, the protest

movement became increasingly liberal and neoliberal, adopting what might be

understood as an “all protestors matter” ethos, failing to attend to the raciality of the

mining project and the racial technocapitalism upon which it rested. By racial

technocapitalism, I refer to the modes in which global technology capital inheres

raciality, as well as anticommunism. Racial technocapitalism, along with its twin

concept of techno-imperialism, or the imperial desires and materialities undergirding

Western technological growth, here allow me to think through the contours of the

political within a particular postsocialism-liberalism nexus.

Over time, the Roșia Montană protests grew into the Light Revolution, Rezist,

and Muie PSD protests of 2017 and 2018. These movements, largely lodged against

remnants of socialism (interpreted as stymying Romania of Western recognition and

promises), also draw upon liberal and anticommunist imaginaries of a return to the

pre-socialist fascist “Golden Era.” In invoking earlier understandings of space, these

protests, the largest since the 1989 collapse of socialism, have become increasingly

racist, classist, anticommunist, and heteromasculine in nature. In looking at this

reinterpretation of the past, I introduce the idea of technofascism, or the endurance of

fascist promises in the moment of postsocialist techno-imperialism. Might it be that

130

liberalism and fascism are twin concepts inextricably entwined in this postsocialist

moment?

For instance, during the Light Revolution of early 2017, nearly one million

Romanians took to the streets, demanding an end to political corruption. Likening the

ruling political party to the “dark” socialist past, an ongoing postsocialist trope,

protestors appealed to the West for salvation. Utilizing smart phone displays and

lasers, protestors gained recognition for their technological prowess, understood now

as a sign of Western becoming (despite that technology was also a rich part of

socialism’s official and underground histories). Demonstrators also adopted an

explicitly heteronormative aesthetic, troubling post-Cold War framings of socialism

as deviant and queer (Popa 2018). While these aspirational politics can be traced back

to the Enlightenment, referencing peripheral subjectivities of being never quite

techno-normative enough, protestors expressed a specifically postsocialist

spatiotemporality, framing state socialism as a void, something to be finally overcome

by returning to pre-socialism. In doing so, demonstrators effectively straightjacketed

ideas of Communism upon those of fascism, forgetting that state socialism emerged

as an antifascist project in Romania long before authoritarian rule emerged in the

1970s and 1980s. In this way, techno-normativity draws upon Elizabeth Freeman’s

“chrononormativity,” or the use of time to meld human bodies into maximum

productivity (2010). Techno-normativity however implies the use of technology to

position “illiberal” geopolitical spaces and the people within them as desirous of

becoming chrononormative. Techno-normativity hinges upon the promise that Silicon

Valley and the West will save Romania from its dark, technologically backwards

131

socialist past that continues to haunt the present.

The Light Revolution, informed by Roșia Montană organizing and Western

desires, is also deeply entangled with the Romanian architectural heritage movement.

This movement seeks to preserve interwar era buildings and public space, going far

enough as to produce Bucharest’s second-largest political party, the Union to Save

Romania (USR). Significantly, the creative capital values that this movement inheres

are aligned with both anticommunist protests and restitution eviction politics.

Heritage and restitution practices, deeply racialized, are steeped in anticommunist

politics, and zombie socialism (Chelcea and Druță 2016). Zombie socialism, as I

describe in the introduction, is a neoliberal postsocialist hegemonic form that

interpolates Communism as a backward deadened void—one that threatens to return

and consume the inevitability of liberal democracy, zombie like. In the case of the

Light Revolution, Zombie socialism has laid the groundwork, promising to rid

corruption with transparency, light, and techno-normativity.

In addition to studying anti-corruption protests and pushing forward the twin

analytics of Zombie socialism and techno-normativity, in this chapter I also study

forest restitutions and destruction by the Swedish IKEA corporation, particularly as

they, like the mining company, destroy Romania’s ecosystem. As with other forms of

techno-imperialism, forest dispossession is coated as liberal progress under the veneer

of anticommunist techno-urbanism, particularly as IKEA becomes involved in

Bucharest information technology (IT) office development. Why is that so few people

come out to defend the forests or protest IKEA, but hundreds of thousands continue

to protest government corruption and communist ghosts? How does the fantasy of

132

intimacy with Western modernity incarcerate and obliterate real possibilities of

dissent? How do postsocialist protests index the racist, capitalist, and fascist contours

of liberalism and techno-imperialism, or techno-fascism? Postsocialist analytics, I

argue, offer a unique lens into these questions and conjunctures.

Interestingly, on the “liberal side” of the Cold War 2.0’s “Silicon Curtain,”

liberal and leftist media alike was quick to venerate the large-scale nature of

Romanian protests, positing that if only Americans could learn from their Romanian

compatriots, perhaps the fascistic Trump too can be taken down. From Al Jazeera to

The New York Times, articles venerated the large crowds gathering outside of

Romania’s parliament. As such, two parallel fantasies exist, with the East and the

West each differentially vying to become the other, each reifying a timeline in which

liberal progress means overcoming fascism and corruption. But why does this also get

written as overcoming Communism? What does this say about liberalism,

postsocialist temporality, and the public space in which these demonstrations

transpire?

Here I consider how in postsocialist contexts, liberalism, or in this case

technoliberalism, can be understood as co-constitutive of racial technocapitalism, and

in more extreme forms, technofascism. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write that

technoliberalism can be understood as “a reinvigoration of the historical imbrications

of liberalism and fascism—the twin pillars of US economic, social, and geopolitical

supremacy” (2019, 24). As they offer, “Rather than posit a break between the liberal

and fascist logics of automation, we insist on their codependence.” (ibid., 24). This,

they suggest, can be tracked “through Cold War discourses of automation as

133

mediating the distinction between democratic liberalism and totalitarianism as the

prehistory of contemporary discourses around robotics and white loss in the era of the

Trump presidency” (ibid., 24). Here I map technofascism’s enfolding with

technoliberalism in postsocialist space, looking to the reinterpretation of Cold War

anticommunist imaginaries.

In the three empirical sections that follow, I first study the Roșia Montană

protests in more length, looking to the liberalism and racism inherent in both protests

and extractive mining. I then turn to the Light Revolution protests, focusing upon the

use of Western technology to index Western becoming, as well as the architectural

heritage movement upon which the protests rest. The third section then looks at

IKEA, as connected to both deforestation and urban renewal, questioning why there

has been so little opposition to the Swedish megacompany amongst the left. But first,

I explore why there has been a resurgence of the Cold War as a descriptor of present-

day geopolitics in the West. In doing so, I remain critical of the explanatory logics of

the Cold War as it positions Eastern European socialist histories and their remains as

augurs of growing technofascist possibilities, eliding the violence that liberal

democracy and disaster capitalism have wreaked in postsocialist contexts.

Postsocialism: Re-evaluating Liberalism and Authoritarianism and the Cold

War 2.0

In their now canonical article, “Thinking Between the Posts: Post-colonialism,

Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War,” Sharad Chari and Katherine

Verdery argue that “ethnography must … employ a critical lens on the global [and

134

epistemological] effects of Cold War thought throughout the twentieth century. It is

time to liberate the Cold War from the ghetto of Soviet area studies and post-colonial

thought from the ghetto of Third World and colonial studies. The liberatory path

proposed here the jettisoning of these two posts in favor of a single overarching one:

the post-Cold War” (2009, 29). Chari and Verdery understand the Cold War as an

epistemological limit to how the world could be known in the second half of the 20th

century.

While Chari and Verdery’s interest is in the critique of area studies paradigms,

one might also consider another epistemological impasse brought on by the Cold War

paradigm—that is, the positing of liberalism and illiberalism (for instance, fascism,

totalitarianism, and antidemocratic tendencies) as paradigmatic opposites in the

political-ideological spectrum. This Cold War opposition mapped the free and unfree

worlds—a cartography that remains intact today upon a palimpsestic atlas. However,

through continued reliance upon geohistorical Cold War maps, one fails to understand

how their dialectical contours enable fascism to grow uncharted, and how fascism and

techno-imperialism become co-constitutive, informing technofascism. One also fails

to theorize the messy post-Cold War techno-entanglements that manifest in spaces

not often centered in Cold War antipodal geographies (Barad 2017; Hecht 2011;

Masco 2006; Voyles 2015)—spaces such as Romania. Thus, by theorizing

postsocialism as entangled with liberal and fascist conjunctures, imperial-

technocapitalist forms can be understood in new ways.

Postsocialism marks not only a temporal but also a spatial orientation toward a

possible politics in a post-Cold War world. Here, I think of spatiality not only in

135

terms of the maintenance of East/West imaginary antipodes, but also as it defines the

locations, limits, and temporalities of revolutionary imaginaries. As such, post-Cold

War framing is a useful conceptual lens with which one can track how public space

works to avert (and erase) the crises in liberalism through the affirmation of concepts

that bolster technocapitalist and techno-imperial proliferation (including transparency

and anticorruption). As I observe, contested spaces are about an affirmation of

Westernness or Europeanness that is dehistoricized and, therefore, uncritical of the

politics of privatization and dispossession.

Postsocialism emerged as a term in academic writing in the 1990s after the

fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR. As Chari and Verdery note,

unlike postcolonialism, which entered academic discourses years after the

decolonization movements began and was even at its inception a theoretical concept,

postsocialism, initially at least, was a descriptor of what came after the end of formal

state socialism. It portrayed, Verdery argues, “reorganization on a cosmic scale,”

redefining and reordering “people’s entire meaningful worlds” through processes of

privatization, lustration, “democratization,” and “transition” (two modes of liberal-

democratic governance)—in other words, the remaking of persons from socialist to

capitalist subjects (2005, 35). Initially, however, it was limited as a descriptor and

applied mostly to Central and Eastern European nations, and at times, when modified,

to China and Vietnam (Atanasoski and Vora 2018; Chari and Verdery 2009; Buck-

Morss 2000; Rofel 2019; Zhang 2008). Thus, following the 1990s, postsocialism

increasingly appeared less relevant to theorizations of social and cultural life within

global capitalism. After all, if simply a depiction of economic, social, or

136

governmental transition, that transition had to reach an end at some point—a point

from which one could ask, “What was postsocialism and what comes next?” Yet, as

recent years have shown (particularly during Obama’s presidency and now during

Trump’s), the Cold War seems to be alive and well as a revived framework for

apprehending the world, at least in the US. From Russia’s ban at the 2016 and 2018

Olympics, to accusations of spying and hacking attributed to both Russian and

Romanian illiberals, the contemporary moment invites us to revisit the theoretical

place of postsocialism. Amidst the so-called “cosmic ruptures” of today (Dunn 2017),

postsocialism becomes an important theoretical concept with which to investigate not

only formations of illiberalism as they are iterated by Cold War ghosts, but also

liberalism, its purported antidote. Postsocialism becomes an analytic through which

one can question why it is that the Cold War other maintains a position of enemy in

the liberal imaginary, while Silicon Valley imperialism is rendered benign and

salvific.

When not ghettoized within area studies, postsocialism (as related to but

separate from the post-Cold War) is, as I assert, relevant as a theoretical concept

suited for assessing the time and space of political action. It is particularly useful in

moments when revolution either seems impossible or, when it happens, as inevitably

ending in either in totalitarianism or liberal democracy (Buck-Morss 2002; Scott

2013). As Atanasoski and Vora have argued (2018), when apprehended as theoretical

ground, postsocialism marks not the end of all socialisms, but the end of state

socialism as a dominant discourse overdetermined by Cold War knowledge

production about the world. Conceptually, then, postsocialism enables an exploration

137

of socialist legacies on multiple scales, expanding beyond state socialism and the

Communist International, and how these have (or have not) remained constitutive of

contemporary radical and decolonial imaginaries of collectivity and political action.

Put otherwise, postsocialism facilitates an assessment of ongoing socialist legacies in

new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state and technocapitalist

military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.

Given the revival of the Cold War as a geopolitical frame, postsocialism also

offers an important corrective to the dehistoricizing, decontextualizing, and limiting

binary framing of democracy and authoritarianism as the only (and opposing)

political forms. The so-called “Cold War 2.0” takes place in a moment when state

socialism has receded into the past, but in which the model of antagonistic battle for

imperial control of “satellite” states between the US and Russia seems alive and well,

written as a contest between liberalism and illiberalism, and between democracy and

authoritarianism (Lemon 2018). Sorin Cucu has questioned why the Cold War is the

ghost that the contemporary conception of world history (or world politics) needs

(2017). Taking on both the understanding that we are experiencing a resurgence of

the Cold War, and the notion that the Cold War never ended, he argues instead that

“Even if we accept that the continuity of the Cold War trumps the pattern of change

experienced by the world in the last few decades, we still need to accept that the Cold

War today has none of its former power and that, in spirit, it allows for contradictions

in so far as these contradictions are enabling reconfigurations of its discursive make-

up” (2017). In other words, Cold War discourse accommodates its own contradictions

to create various geopolitical configurations and fantasies as historical inevitabilities.

138

The historical inevitability engendered by the framework of “Cold War 2.0”

resuscitates the oppositional tension between terms like democracy and

authoritarianism with no existing critique of capitalism. According to Alexei

Yurchak, “the opposition of ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism,’ … instead of

providing analytical clarity, in fact, contributes to decoupling ‘democracy’ from

‘capitalism’ and thus concealing and depoliticizing the real conditions” (2017, 1). Yet

capitalism and liberal democracy have been historically entangled, as has been the

case in numerous postsocialist contexts. Together, they were violently injected in the

aftermath of socialism in order to destroy its legacies and possibilities of endurance.

For instance, in the case of Romania (as in many other formerly state socialist

nations), the transition to liberal democracy meant privatizing, fragmenting, and

restituting state-owned land, housing, technology, and factories, leading to rampant

dispossession (often racialized), and a return of pre-socialist wealth (Florea 2016;

Verdery 2003). At the same time, transition installed a regime of elites who

transformed late-socialist power relations into new forms of crony capitalism backed

by Western firms and interests, razing many of what had been successful and

independent sectors (O’Neill 2016; Pusca 2016; Vincze 2017). Today, Romania

remains an extractive space for Western capitalism, from Silicon Valley IT firms to

Austrian lumber companies, maintaining the highest material and social deprivation

rate in the EU (Eurostat 2017).

Yet on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, liberal democracy, rather than

reflecting upon the destructive powers of its capitalist incarnation, makes its object of

critique authoritarianism, which, in the era of the Cold War 2.0, is increasingly

139

conflated with Communism. Both the Light Revolution and Colorful Revolution

protestors, rather than blaming global capital for post-1989 devastation, blame

treasonous politicians who they render unpatriotic, un-European, and Communist. As

Yurchak elaborates, the liberal reduction of the political field informs the resurgence

of “‘patriotism’ versus ‘treason’ and of ‘patriots’ versus ‘foreign agents’” (2017, 3).

In the US, this discursive strategy divorces Trump’s victory from US political

contexts, which have everything to do with the endurance of neoliberal hegemony,

technocapitalism, and white supremacy (Kelley 2016), instead impugning illiberal

outsider interference. As such, “Real politics becomes displaced onto the stereotyped

figures of ‘foreign agents and patriots who oppose them’” (Yurchak 2017, 3).

Given the resurgence of the “Cold War” as a paradigm to assess geopolitics in

media venues, and, given Cucu’s and Yurchak’s incisive critiques about this revival

as a reductionist move, it seems that postsocialism may be more useful than the post-

Cold War in allowing for a nuanced assessment of contested political terrains. These

contested terrains often concretely have to do with struggles over place. Yet in

Romania, mass demonstrations for such places enact liberal democracy and

capitalism as the inevitable future, from the Light Revolution’s anticommunism to

Roșia Montană’s demonstrations which increasingly displaced anti-capitalist politics.

In this context, the recirculation of “Cold War” as a frame of reference for geopolitics

rehearses the terms of Cold War liberalism in its binaristic logics to conflate

capitalism with democracy, transparency, and accountability. Kristen Ghodsee writes,

“Just as the popular stereotype of communism is rarely uncoupled from the state

repression of the twentieth-century experience of it, today . . . the democratic ideal is

140

becoming inseparable from the social chaos neoliberal capitalism has wreaked in its

name” (2016, xviii). However, here I push this further to question how “the

democratic ideal” in fact necessitates the grotesque coupling of socialism with state

repression.

Really since 1989, proponents of liberal democracy on both sides of the

former Berlin Wall have read state socialism through an anticommunist lens,

inhering, often with and through technology, what Konrad Petrovszky and Ovidiu

Țichindeleanu describe as postsocialist colonial subjectivities amongst Eastern

Europeans (2011). These subjectivities rely upon an asymmetrical interplay between

the East and the West. The East was mapped as the “other” within the West, while the

West was “put into covert circulation in the territory of the East” (Wark 1994, 65).

Thus, while the West imagines the Eastern other as a necessary yet backward

figure within its own dialectical cosmology, postsocialist coloniality incites the East

to entwine Western cosmological imaginaries with its own. This uneven interplay

foments zombie socialism, dehistoricizing the past, thereby paving the way for a

neoliberal future. For instance, in 2008, conservative Eastern European politicians

and intellectuals signed the Prague Declaration, equating the victims of Communism

with the victims of Nazi Germany, demanding justice from EU governing bodies.

Here, Communism and fascism are interpreted as one and the same—the evil,

fascistic monster that liberal democracy will save us from. Always lurking behind the

curtain, zombie socialism threatens to turn people already presumed and subjectified

as backward further back. Liberal democracy not only fears socialism's existence but

also hinges upon its realness to justify its own.

141

According to Nikhil Pal Singh, “totalitarianism” was both the “primary

explanatory terrain concerning the post-World War II division of Europe,” and a

reassertion of “racist and colonialist divisions of the world and its peoples that had

allegedly been left behind in the U.S.-led break from the logics of fascism and

empire” (2009, 68). As he elaborates, “the theory of totalitarianism became the hinge

connecting the frame of U.S. global power to the teleological door of modernization

that opened and closed on new nations according to a more deeply embedded set of

norms and assumptions about obedience, deference, emotional ‘maturity,’

trustworthiness, rational capacity, and fitness for self-government” (ibid., 68). The

binaristic opposition between democracy and totalitarianism, and between liberalism

and fascism, marks the entanglement of these post-Enlightenment ideological

formations. Democratic liberalism imagines fascism as its “monstrous Other,” as its

“doppelganger or double.” This is why liberalism needs to maintain a fascist threat

especially when its legitimacy is called into question.

Because postsocialism takes the demise of state socialism as the occasion to

highlight the entanglement of capitalism with liberal democracy, it is as theoretical

ground aligned with Singh’s call to theorize liberalism as a violent, racial, colonial,

and expansionist ideological form. Postsocialism calls attention to the violence of

economic and political liberalization even as it asks to make legible other socialist

legacies and new modes of envisioning politics. It also calls to attention new modes

of entangling geographies of theory and spatiotemporal subjectivities, in which it is

not only “the East” interpreting Western cosmologies and cosmic ruptures, but also

now Western scholars gazing eastward for illiberal prefiguration.

142

In this sense, I take a slightly different approach to postsocialism from those

who, since the election of Donald Trump, have begun to wonder whether

“postsocialism,” as theoretical ground, finally has something to offer the so-called

“West” because it can theorize illiberalism. In an earlier moment, some scholars

argued that because the postsocialist condition reified a homogenized idea of Europe

and liberal capitalism to which post-state socialist nations (at least in Central and

Eastern Europe) aspired, postsocialism had no critical insights to offer scholarship

engaged with Marxist and decolonial thought (Lazarus 2010). Yet in a post-Brexit

and post-Trump world, postsocialism finally seems to have something to offer that is

new and not belated—a knowledge of a totalitarianism and illiberalism that has now

arrived in the so-called West. These ideas often hinge upon zombie socialist media

stories and popular hype. As Dace Dzenovska and Larisa Kurtović argue, “A quick

overview of interventions made by or on behalf of (post)socialist subjects in the

Western media at the moment reveal that there are at least four dimensions to the

new-found public audibility of the (post)socialist subject: (1) knowledge of

totalitarianism/authoritarianism; (2) knowledge of fascism/nationalism; (3)

knowledge of Russia; and (4) prefiguration of the future of the West” (2016, 3). As

they elaborate, it is precisely that which made the postsocialist subject irrelevant in

the past to Western knowledge production that today makes the same subject

relevant. Today, the postsocialist subject is finally able to elucidate something about

the present in places like the US and the UK. However, as I suggest, it is not because

the postsocialist subject understands the perils of fascism that makes postsocialism

relevant in the current moment, whether in the media or in contemporary scholarship.

143

Rather, postsocialist critique is a rich space within which to theorize the perils of

liberalism, and the fascism that it enables. If there is any future prefiguration to be

done, liberalism rather than illiberalism might be the more politically salient object of

critique. In what follows, I turn to liberal manifestations in Romania—not necessarily

to prefigure the future of the West but rather to provincialize liberal geographies of

theory and contemporary manifestations of the Cold War 2.0, zombie socialism, and

techno-normativity.

Blood Gold

While there are many origin stories to the anti-corruption protests that have

taken over the streets of Bucharest and Cluj in recent years, many people site the Save

Roşia Montană (Salvați Roşia Montană) demonstrations of several years earlier as

integral in building praxis of large-scale collective organizing in Romania. The

demonstrations erupted in 2013, in response to an extractive gold mining project in

the Apușeni Mountains being conducted by a Canadian mining company, Gabriel

Resources. Throughout the summer, each Sunday, thousands of Romanians took to

the streets, mostly in Bucharest and Cluj, protesting Gabriel’s exploitative and

speculative practices, demanding that the state halt all joint business dealings. Unlike

the Light Revolution protests, those of Roşia Montană were initially positioned

against Western imperiality and global capital. But nevertheless, they too became

absorbed by zombie socialism. Further, while they can be read as a widescale

demonstration against capitalism and its Anthropocenic impacts, for the most part, the

protests failed to address the raciality of capitalism, historically and

144

contemporaneously. By theorizing Save Roşia Montană through postsocialist

analytics, the raciality of liberalism comes into focus—a structure that set the tone for

the Light Revolution protests to follow.

From Save Roşia Montană to the Light Revolution, Romanian protests over

the last decade have increasingly understood Western corporations as salvific, coming

in to rescue Romania from its backwards socialist technology. Gabriel Resources, in

its techno-imperial drive to absorb Romania’s minerals, speculates upon future

growth by pathologizing the darkness of socialist mining practices. While it demands

Romania’s gold, it also suggests that the loss of minerals to the state is insignificant,

as rocks have “no soul” in the language of liberalism. Meanwhile the antimining

movement, as it has become increasingly liberal as well, has banished space for anti-

capitalist and antiracist alterity, thereby making dead the possibilities of revolutionary

futures past. In this way, Roşia Montană has become a site of deadness and deadened

resistance.

Roşia Montană (Red Mountain), long scarred and rendered “bloody” through

extractive mining technologies going back to the Roman Empire, the mountain

contains the largest gold deposit in the European continent. Since 1989, restitution

and privatization have poised the mountain and much of the country as newly

exploitable, often in the name of “cleaning up” the debris of socialist property

nationalization and as well as industrialization. This of course has been supported by

the projection of Europeanization, heralding post-1989 shifts to “cleaner, lighter”

industry as liberation from the heavy industry and grey polluted landscapes of the

Communist past (Pavlínek and Pickles 2000, 9; Vincze 2017). In November 2006,

145

when the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee voted on reports

concerning EU enlargement, included was this statement: “Also, Romania should

speed up the processing of claims relating to the restitution of properties confiscated

by the communist regime and should make further efforts in protecting the

environment, with special reference to the mining in Rosia Montana” (European

Parliament 2006).

State socialism did indeed contribute to regional ecological devastation. The

Communist regime took control of Roşia Montană in 1948, maintaining underground

and open surface operations into the 1970s. During this time the Party sought to

reduce debt and foreign dependency (such as copper imports from Poland and

dependency upon the Soviet Union led Comecon economic assistance), and extractive

mining was one of many means to this end. As many of the gold bearing veins had

been exhausted by the 1970s, and as the regime tripled its debt between 1974 and

1979, the state turned to strip-mining, destroying two mountains, forever altering the

landscape. Nearby is the abandoned village of Geamăna, a ghost town physically

under red water. In 1977, 400 residents of Geamăna were displaced after the state

discovered a massive copper deposit at Roşia Poieni, deciding to create an artificial

catch-basin for the mine’s contaminated cyanide sludge. This was one of countless

rural-industrial spatial rearrangements accompanying the Communist project. It

lingers to date, having subsumed the local houses, church, and cemetery, pooling

toxic cyanide into domestic spaces and the graves of former miners. A church steeple

still floats above the crimson waterline like a tall, thin sailboat upon the horizon,

defying complete submergence.

146

But projects such as these pale in comparison to those speculated upon by

Gabriel. Romania, once dubbed “the granary of Europe,” has been discovered by

technocapitalism hungry for a new type of grain. In 1998, Gabriel Resources Ltd.,

through a joint Romanian government venture, began exploration of the mountain.

Despite ample evidence of dire contamination (Manske et al. 2006), its newly formed

entity public-private enterprise (80 percent private), Rosia Montana Gold Corporation

(RMGC), proposed opening four mines forty times the size of the state socialist

operation, exacting billions of US dollars in profit. Since inception, it has worked to

obtain permission to exploit 300 tons of gold and 1,600 tons of silver, and to destroy

three villages and four mountains by annually employing 12,000 tons of cyanide to

obtain precious metals. Sodium cyanide solutions are used to leach gold from ore, and

it is extremely toxic. For instance, in 2000, 3.5 million cubic feet of cyanide was

spilled after a tailings dam ruptured in the Romanian city of Baia Mare, killing 1,400

tons of fish and leading disastrous health and environmental impacts along the

Danube and Tisza Rivers all of the way into Hungary for years (Beyerle and Olteanu

2016). In addition to jeopardizing public and environmental health, the proposed

project at Roşia Montană would also lead to the destruction of ancient patrimonial

monuments, much to the chagrin of heritage preservationists. Even the Ministry of

Justice argued the project unjust, violating articles 44 and 136 of the Romanian

Constitution on the right to private property and modalities of state expropriation. It

was also observed that Romania would only benefit from six percent of the project’s

profits (Project RISE 2013).

As soon as Gabriel landed in Romania, local activists began fighting back. In

147

2000, village farmers formed the NGO Alburnus Maior to fight the company in court.

Two years later they launched the campaign, Salvați Roşia Montană (Save Roşia

Montană). Then in 2004, environmental activists began holding the annual summer

Fân Fest festival in the mountain, building up collective ecological solidarity. So,

when in September 2013, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) led government acceded

to Gabriel Resources intense lobbying and permitted them the ability to begin mining,

there was already a large base from which to build resistance.

A series of local and national protests took place in September 2013 under the

banner of Salvați Roşia Montană and United We Save (Uniți Salvăm). These

amounted to the largest series of protests since 1989 at the time (now trumped by

Rezist). Each Sunday, thousands of protestors took to the streets, demanding that

Romania sever all ties with Gabriel. Solidarity actions were held in numerous

Western cities as well, from Brussels to Chicago. In October, over 5,000 residents

and activists gathered in Câmpeni, Romania, presenting an eleven-point declaration,

which included the prohibition of cyanide and hydraulic fracking, investigations into

the funding activities of RMCC, declassification of government relations with Gabriel

Resources, resignation and criminal investigations into supporters of the project, and

inclusion of Roșia Montană on Romania's tentative list for UNESCO world heritage

sites. They also alleged a media blackout, pointing to Gabriel Resources buying 5.4

million dollars in ads and campaigning (Forbes 2013). Meanwhile then PSD Prime

Minister Victor Ponta accused those in the camp of extremist behavior. In return,

protesters cited Ponta’s corruption.

While one might imagine that RMGC would, in its campaigning, position

148

itself as against the antimining movement, instead it mostly denounced “dirty”

socialist-era mining practices, using the language of “sustainable development,”

“environmental sustainability,” and “corporate social responsibility.” Corporate social

responsibility, or CSR, has become a catchphrase amongst numerous multinational

corporations in Romania, used to posit new “light” industry such as IT as salvific

against the backdrop of socialist-era technology. Often CSR is used in bluewashing

and pinkwashing campaigns alike, from McDonald’s giving of coffee during Rezist to

Google, IBM, Accenture, and IKEA’s use of the Bucharest LGBT pride in 2018 for

advertisement purposes. CSR, in Romania, is used to create an imaginary in which

politicians are corrupt and backwards, but in which corporations are salvific and the

way of the future.

While the early Save Roşia Montană campaign was led by anti-globalization

activists attentive to the deadly effects of disaster capitalism, as the protests grew,

they became increasingly liberal and nationalistic, inching away from the tenor of the

2008 anti-NATO protests and anti-austerity demonstrations of 2012. Today, the

antifascist and anarchist community in Romania often traces their own consolidation,

but also their being targeted, to the 2008 anti-NATO protests, even though only a few

of those active today were part of the 2008 organizing. It was then that Between April

1st and 4th, 2008, a police regime was established in Bucharest in order to secure

conditions for the NATO anniversary summit at the Palace of the Parliament. Police

searches for anti-NATO activists in homes and residential buildings became routine.

As Razvan put it in a 2009 retrospective documentary about the “Anti-NATO days”

by Joanne Richardson and Nadia Len (that members of the original protests presented

149

in a ten-year anniversary in the basement of a punk bar in Bucharest in 2018 that I

attended), “I was shocked by the atmosphere of the city . . . Flags everywhere,

Romanian flags, NATO flags, flags of other NATO countries, and the streets

deserted, empty of people, empty of cars. It was as if a theater play was being staged.

It reminded me of Gorbachev’s last visit to Romania in 1987, when people weren’t

allowed to stroll casually on the streets.” Or, in Rodica’s words, “The fear of being

followed and spied on continued for many months. Those things we wanted to keep

secret, we never said out loud. We whispered to each other even when we were alone

in the room.” International solidarity against NATO was heavily thwarted by the

Romanian government as well. For instance, on March 20th, six German activists

were stopped at the border and held in secret service custody for fourteen hours. The

only justification for this refusal was the possession of anti-war informational

materials. According to the border police “anti-native and anti-violence brochures

were found in their luggage” (Redacția 2013). In the end, dozens of Romanians and

Germans, as well as a handful of other activists from other countries detained by the

police. Some people had been severely injured by armed forces who attacked the

factory warehouse building where they had been organizing. But the 60 or so people

that were part of the anti-NATO dissent were able to engage in a series of

discussions, workshops, and film screenings in a hall they had rented in order to offer

“a critical alternative to the formal paradigm of NATO’s existence, mission, and

expansion” (ibid. 2013).

Yet he organizing that took place to dissent NATO’s April 2008 presence in

Romania lasted well after the initial dissent, in part leading to the formation of the

150

feminist, anarchist social center, Biblioteca Alternativă, in Bucharest. I first visited

and stayed at the social center in 2011, after having returned from an international

anarchist “Space Camp” in Moldova, where a few Romanian friends of mine studying

at the Central European University in Budapest had convinced me to hitchhike with

them to across Romania. After the space camp, we headed to the Biblioteca in

Bucharest. The social center, nestled within a quiet residential neighborhood, was

structurally falling apart a bit, yet warm and cozy on the inside, contained an actual

library filled with zines and feminist-anarchist texts, some bedrooms and a kitchen,

and a courtyard where events, meetings, and parties were held. Texts were organized

in categories such as sociology/anthropology, anarchism/social movements/direct

action, gender/sexuality/LGBTQ, colonialism/militarism, repression/political

prisoners, literature, and art/photography.

The original Biblioteca Alternativă moved locations within Bucharest shortly

after my stay there, and then, a couple years later, the second iteration experienced

political infighting over matters of the merits of US feminist and antiracist theory, as

well as due to conflict around Roma feminism in Romania. Those who strove to keep

the Biblioteca Alternativă open after formed then formed Clacă, a similar social

center that also housed the library, this time hidden in a large, abandoned factory

building. As with the Bilblioteca, workshops, events, and clothing swaps took place

there. During my first time there I led a workshop on mapping evictions and anti-

eviction struggles in San Francisco, launching what would become an ongoing anti-

eviction solidarity connection between the two locales. It was there too that the

Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire (the Common Front for the Right to

151

Housing / FCDL) was formed—the Bucharest-based anti-eviction group that I am a

part of in Romania. Unfortunately, the space that housed Clacă was adjacent to the

Colectiv Nightclub, which accidentally caught on fire in October 2015, leading to the

deaths of 64 people (as well as massive street protests and the resignation of the

Prime Minister, which I explain more later in this chapter). The entire area

surrounding the fire on Tăbăcarilor in Sector 4 was left uninhabitable, and the wary

and exhausted members of Clacă had to find yet another space.

Soon after, the Macaz Bar Coop was formed on Moșilor in the city-center, a

collectively owned bar, social center, theatre space, and library known for its late-

night parties, public events, and political theatre plays. As of 2019, the space, situated

amongst a handful of buildings undergoing restitution evictions, is having to dissolve

due to landlord pressures. The area, once the heart of the Jewish community before

socialism, and which then was left abandoned and derelict during socialism, became

an area filled with Roma families. Many, post-1989, are now squatting in their former

homes without formal rental contracts from the state. In 2014, one building on

Vulturilor Street filled with over 100 Roma people underwent a restitution eviction,

leading to a massive street protest encampment that lasted over two years (Lancione

2018). Members of the FCDL heavily supported the Vulturilor encampment, in part

informing their moving into the Moșilor spot to begin with. Today, due to the impacts

of restitution in the Sector 3 neighborhood, the entire area is undergoing rapid

gentrification. Nevertheless, the Macaz collective plans to open one to two parallel

spaces on the other side of the city-center, one of which will also house other leftist

activist collectives.

152

It was during the transition from the Biblioteca to Clacă that the initial Roșia

Montană protests were taking shape. It was also during this time that the sister

anarchist social/space, library was forming in Cluj, A-casă. Located in the heart of

what it now the tech-led speculation and racial dispossession accumulating in the

Măraști neighborhood (that I describe in Chapter 1), A-casă too is now is facing

impending displacement. But in 2013, before the contemporary displacements were

envisioned, members of both the Bucharest-based Biblioteca and Cluj-based A-cacă

joined forces in protesting Gabriel Resources. Since members of both groups had

direct ties to the anti-NATO organizing of a few years prior, many saw Gabriel as the

newest iteration of the capitalist globalization that they had initially organized to fight

against. After all, the head of Gabriel, Frank Timis (an Australian-Romanian), was

already known for his devastating iron ore mining operations in Sierra Leone. This

had led to the displacement of local villagers, earning him the nickname, “Emperor of

African Resources” (Beyerle and Oteanu 2016). For the anti-capitalist, anarchist

organizers, Gabriel Resources stood in for a new technocapitalist imperial form—a

techno-imperial one.

However, instead of being targeted by the police as these anarchists had

grown accustomed, increasingly in the Roșia Montana organizing spaces, they were

targeted by more liberal organizers. Increasingly, antifascist and anti-capitalist

organizers were made marginal, as those with more liberal and “all-protestors-matter”

rhetoric took the reins. One friend of mine, upon asking why it was suddenly okay for

far-right nationalist groups to attend marches, was told by a lead organizer that it

helps with the numbers. Naturally, when far-right protestors began attacking

153

antifascists, the latter retreated, thereby decreasing numbers. Another group of anti-

capitalists were evicted from a Roșia Montană summer camp for espousing “too

much ‘Down with Capitalism’ (Jos Capitalismul) messaging. When an antifascist

organizer publicly confronted a protest leader about the increasingly cramped space

from which to articulate anti-capitalist politics at the camp, she was told, “the beauty

of the movement is that you’ll see a homophobe holding hands with a homosexual.”

Put otherwise, the protests embraced a form of liberalism in which both homophobes

and homosexuals “matter.” Yet, while capitalists were welcomed, anti-capitalists

were explicitly not—thereby revealing the limits of liberal notions of inclusivity.

Meanwhile, journalists such as Dan Tapalagă dismissed anti-capitalists in the

movement as incomprehensible to the generation which overthrew the Communists

(2013), while Marius Ghilezan blamed the parents of anti-capitalist youth for “failing

to give their children a pro-capitalist view” (2013). One good friend of mine from the

then Clacă space remembers being kicked of the summer camp. She now works in

Macaz, and she is disgusted that some of the very people who kicked her out now try

to hang out in the Macaz bar as if nothing happened.

In the 2018 documentary film Portavoce (Megaphone), directed by Ruxandra

Gubernat, Marcel Schreiter, and Henry Rammelt, the Roșia Montană, Colectiv, and

Rezist protests were positioned together to make sense of the political and collective

ethos tethering them. Debuted in Romania’s 2018 One World Romania film festival,

the film is highly skewed. Of fourteen people interviewed, thirteen are men. Prior

anti-capitalistic protests are ignored altogether, and instead interviewees are largely

either DJs or musicians in rock and alternative bands such as Luna Amară and the

154

Amsterdams. Others are engaged in creative capital ventures such as Street Delivery.

Street Delivery, formed in Bucharest in 2006 by the Cărtureşti Foundation and

the Romanian Architects Order, is a project aimed at “delivering” culture to the city’s

streets. Having had different iterations, such as Train Delivery and Rahova Delivery,

gentrifying neighborhoods are often preferred. As Veda Popovici (the only female

voice featured in Portavoce) critiques, “Artists, by making use of their symbolic and

social capital, as well as their ability to translate the cultural phenomena of

underprivileged groups for the middle class, are the first who can indicate to investors

and the said middle class that areas such as Gara de Nord or Rahova have a certain

something which can be converted into capital with very little investment” (2014).

While Rahova is a Roma working-class neighborhood now being redeveloped

as the site of Rahova Business Center and AFI tech park, the area surrounding the

train station at Gara de Nord is adjacent to Matache and the Berzei-Buzesti

development. As Popovici argues, Train Delivery, funded by the state, Cărtureşti, and

Sony, was part of a larger attempt to demolish homes “associated with poverty and

provincialism and ‘clean up’ the area,” establish tech offices, and then finally

culture—classic gentrification teleology. Also delivered as part of the festival were a

series of “workshops” —one organized by law enforcement on how to avoid being

pickpocketed, and one by local heritage architects on Matache. Per Popovici, “The

‘pickpockets’ are symbolic representations of the local population: a poor one,

plagued by lawlessness. The middle-class, led by its ‘creative’ avant-garde, ‘the

citizens,’ will learn how to guard their possessions once they venture into the area”

(2014).

155

Instructively, Portavoce posits organizers of events such as Street Delivery as

the architects of Romania’s more recent Rezist protests. As Gubernat suggests in an

interview, the film effectively defines Romanian protest culture as “recreational

activism” (Călinescu 2018). When comparing protests with those of the surrounding

region and Western Europe, they find lower levels of commitment, increased

flexibility in ideology, and less importance placed upon formal groups and

organizing. Many of these recreational activists work for multinational corporations

or are engaged in creative capitalism, and fully take on zombie socialist imaginaries.

Many protestors desire to disaggregate their “patriotism” from Communist

nationalism, wearing flags to represent themselves as the “new Romania.” This new

Romania maintains one common enemy, Gubernat says: that of corrupt Communist-

era elites. Also important amongst protestors is the “concept of a scene,” she explains,

aligned with others who have described Salvați Roșia Monatană as the “protest of

hipsters” (Ruse 2013). This analysis speaks to how mainstream the protests have

become in Romania, a far cry from the events organized by the 60 anti-NATO

protestors of 2008, as well as from the ongoing anti-eviction organizing taking place

in Macaz and A-casă.

While the hipsters of these large protests, to their credit, have been effective in

building powerful movements, importantly, critiques of capitalism and its racist

underpinnings are displaced by zombie socialism. And yet, residents living in

Gabriel’s wake who have refused buyout offers to vacate their homes often enough

look back to the days of Communism with nostalgia. As a local farmer Eugene

described, “If they try to forcefully relocate me, I’ll go to Ceausescu’s grave, light a

156

candle, and say: ‘Comrade Ceauşescu, you were a dictator, but I’m sorry we killed

you. You were right and we were wrong’” (Kenarov 2012). Eugene speaks to

RMGC’s determination to not only destroy to valleys, but also to dispossess over

1,800 people living in 740 homes, and even exhume the dead. As an employee of the

Catholic Church paid by RMGC to recruit locals to work for the corporation

frustratingly explained of her job after being interrogated by local activists from Cluj

in the dusty summer of 2013, “I toll the bells for the dead.” Such sentiments

destabilize anticommunist notions of anti-capitalism being the domain of aberrant

urban youth, and of zombie socialism.

As Roşia Montană increasingly becomes ghostly, despite ongoing resistance

from the Save Roşia Montană movement, not all people, and not all dead, are equally

impacted. Disproportionately Roma people are faced with contaminants. Unlike other

villagers in Roşia Montană, many Roma live in Gura Roşiei at the bottom of the

valley. Many once worked for the state mine, but now live in abject conditions,

unemployed, lacking sewage and running water. As an older woman from the region

explained during a visit to Cluj, yes, the cyanide tailings from the dam outside her

house, a result of socialist practices, are toxic, at least during socialism, she and other

Roma there had jobs. While many Roma would work for RMGC in a heartbeat,

institutional racism denies them jobs. Further, everyone around her is sick, or in Julie

Sze’s words, “technologically polluted” (2006). In 2012, a Roma man and former

miner, Uasile Mocioiu, died after a ten-year battle with cancer, having had no access

to employment since socialism. Not only are Roma foreclosed recognition as human

by postsocialist racial technologies, but further they are rendered as contaminable by

157

global capital. For instance, RMGC wants to convert the nearby Corna Valley into a

giant cyanide tailing pond, right above Gura Roşiei. Effectively, Gabriel is thus

attempting to convert both ecological lifeworlds but also human lives into what Tracy

Voyles describes as a wasteland, an undesirable space but also a “racial and spatial

signifier that renders an environment and that bodies that inhabit pollutable” (2015,

9). In this sense, postsocialist technological projects have seen race and space become

tethered in the social construction of whose lifeworlds are rendered contaminable,

allocated to become the maidane (wastelands), and whose are not. This is another of

technofascism’s material effects.

Despite the Roșia Montană movement’s increased liberalism and failures to

address the deadly effects of racial capitalism entangled in the postsocialist

neoliberalism, after months of protesting and successfully overcoming what was a

media blackout, in the spring of 2014, public pressure worked. Thus, despite its

problems, the protests did instigate change. Namely, Romania decided not to vote

upon the law that would allow Gabriel to continue as planned. In return, the company

threatened to take Romania to an international arbitration court. Represented by the

global law firm White & Case, in 2015 Gabriel filed a complaint against Romania in

the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. In

2014, White & Case defended a different Canadian gold mining operation in

Venezuela. This–coupled with the sheer fact that nearly half the cases settled by the

World Bank champion corporations, and that nearly 95 percent of known awards go

to companies with at least one billion USD in annual revenue or to individuals worth

over 100 million USD in net worth (Ciobanu 2015; Corporate Europe 2017, 4)–paints

158

a grim forecast of Romania’s ability to successfully combat global mining capital and

its plantation logics.

By plantation logics, I refer to what Anna Tsing describes as ecological

simplifications in which living things and lifeworlds are converted into assets,

producing virulence along the way (2016). Her metaphor, used to describe uneven,

patchy conditions in the age of the Anthropocene, is especially important to also

theorize alongside Robinson’s conceptual apparatus of racial capitalism (1983),

which understands that from its origins, capitalism (plantation-like as it may be) has

always depended upon the endurance of racism. Following Robinson as well as

Wendy Chun’s call to think race and/as technology (2012), here I argue that

plantation logics are only possible through the application of racial technocapitalism.

This applies to all contexts described as the age of the Anthropocene, from urban to

rural contexts alike. Writing about plantation logics, its temporality, and its

geographies in and beyond US contexts, Katherine McKittrick suggests:

The plantation thesis uncovers the interlocking workings of modernity and

blackness, which culminate in long-standing, uneven racial geographies while

also centralizing that the idea of the plantation is migratory. Thus, in

agriculture, banking, and mining, in trade and tourism, and across other

colonial and postcolonial spaces—the prison, the city, the resort—a plantation

logic characteristic of (but not identical to) slavery emerges in the present both

ideologically and materially (2013, 3).

159

In postsocialist Romania, plantation logics invoke earlier slave histories and their

racial geographies, along with current contexts of global exploitation and techno-

imperialism.

The debates coming out of the International Geological Congress as to when

the Anthropocene—the geological era in which humans have incited irreparable harm

upon the earth, forever altering its course—is now determined to have begun in 1950

with the birth of the Cold War, nuclear testing, and plastics. Yet others have been

arguing that the era began with the onset of Western colonialism, which destroyed

Indigenous worlds irreparable, not to mention the planet’s carbon dioxide levels.

Karen Barad asks, “Is there a sense of temporality that could provide a different way

of positioning these markers of history and understand 1492 as living inside 1945, for

example, and even vice versa?” (2017, 57). I bring this question up here to suggest

that a post-Cold War framing of the Anthropocene, or what Jason Moore describes as

“the Capitalocene” (2015), needs to attend to the racial and colonial elements of

postsocialist transition, which live inside 1945, but also 1989. In the case of Romania,

the imposition of Western capital and liberal democracy in fact reinterprets pre-

socialist understanding of space and race. Prior to socialism, Roșia Montană was

mined by the Romans, the Germans, and the Austro-Hungarians. That it is now being

mined by the imperiality of Canada, enabled by free trade mechanisms, should be of

no surprise.

Roşia Montană protests largely died down after 2014, with many activists

considering their work successful. Yet Alburnus Maior organizers knew that the

struggle was not over, and soon they drafted a petition to include Roșia Montană in

160

the UNESCO World Heritage. This, they suggested, might help in ongoing World

Bank-level disputes. While Victor Ponta ignored their petition, after he resigned

following the Colectiv fire, the new government decided to back the UNESCO

application. In February 2016, the Roșia Montană region was added to Romania’s

tentative list for new World Heritage sites, with support from the Union to Save

Romania (Uniunea Salvaţi România/USR) heritage movement and Western Europe

alike. However, in June 2018, news erupted that Romania had stymied heritage status

allocation, arguing that inclusion might negatively impact the lawsuit against Gabriel.

Small demonstrations ensued, with the objects of critique not the corporation and free

trade, but rather corrupt politicians arbitrating on behalf of the state. While perhaps

this is in part because protestors have now in their back pocket the knowledge that

targeting politicians can be effective, nevertheless, their consolidating of a corrupt

“Communist” enemy perpetuates zombie socialism.

Organizing against Gabriel has nonetheless proved effective in curtailing the

Canadian speculative project from materializing. This is not something to be taken

lightly as it is no easy feat to pressure a government into standing up against a

Western mining company. However, in blockading a form of financial speculation

endemic to postsocialist times without critically examining them as postsocialist,

other speculative futures emerge. These reify Romania’s backwardness and the need

to exorcize all Communist specters from the aberration of socialist hauntology so that

Western values can be finally be fulfilled. Protests are thereby more concerned with

governmental corruption than the corruptive nature of racial technocapitalism, its

plantation logics, and its largest beneficiaries—those of multinational zombie

161

socialist corporations and foreign investors. Indeed, postsocialist Romania is an apt

space from which to theorize liberalism, late and otherwise.

The Light Revolution

In February 2017, Romania’s streets and cities lit up as nearly one million

protestors gathered for days at a time, demanding an end to political corruption.

Bigger than but building upon Roșia Montană organizing, demonstrators affiliated the

ruling Social Democrat Party (Partidul Social Democrat/PSD) to the Red Scare” of

socialist endurance, protestors organized what quickly became the largest collective

protest since those that dismantled state socialism in December 1989. Referred to as

#Rezist, vernacularly dialoguing with anti-Trump #Resist protests concurrently

transpiring in the US, demonstrations also became known as part of the “Light

Revolution,” referencing widespread utilization of digital, smart, and light-emitting

technologies. For instance, hundreds of thousands of smartphones lit up Bucharest’s

Victoriei Square on February 6th, nationalistically choreographed to display the

country’s red, blue, and yellow flag. Lasers projected gimmicky GIFs on the

government building, depicting the ruling party as old, dark, and corrupt, and its

leader, Liviu Dragnea, as poor and full of bad teeth. Millennial technology could now

Trump the backwards, “socialist” party still in power, it was suggested. As one

protestor’s sign read, in English, “FEAR OF THE DARK(nea).” Above him, EU and

US flags waved in the air, flying above professionally printed signs appealing to the

West for salvation from the Red Scare continuing to haunt the country. Signs with

pictures of the EU flag and the English words “Save Us” and “Help Us” were held,

162

while hashtags circulated on social media such as #Rezist and

#Worldagainstcorruption. Romania’s technological prowess, protestors demonstrated,

was light years ahead of the decrepit backwardness that still occupies the government.

By expunging the last remaining Communist specters, Romania could finally catch up

to the West.

Such aspirations of Western becoming can be traced back to the

Enlightenment if not earlier in Romania, referencing peripheral subjectivities of never

being quite modern, European, and technologically advanced enough. However, by

framing Communism as a void, the Light Revolution expressed a specifically

postsocialist temporality, one that understands history as written by Cold War victors.

Telescoping zombie socialism, its mode of historiography flatly elides other readings

of state socialism in Romania, a project that was far from monolithic, one that for

many offered housing, health care, employment, and education for the first time in

national history. For the country’s racialized poor, these have provisions that have

been blown to the wind with post-89 injections of shock capitalism, leading to new

contexts of racial dispossession. This is not to glorify state socialism either, as of

course, there were numerous horrors, especially in the 1980s as Nicolae Ceaușescu

became more authoritarian, but it is to question how Communism gets repeatedly

framed and internalized as backward. It is to ask why the socialist period gets written

as fascistic and behind liberal progressivism, ignoring its explicitly antifascist and

anti-capitalist underpinnings. Why does the consolidation of postsocialist historical

time hinge upon the integration of the East into Western order, yet at the same time,

maintain what Petrovszky and Țichindeleanu describe as an Eastern “ontological time

163

lapse behind the authentic present of the Free World”? The West needs the East to

remain abnormal, and so thus begins, they write, “the long durée of ‘transition,’ the

transition to ‘normality’” (Petrovszky and Țichindeleanu 2011, 42).

Straightjacketing the horrors of Ceaușescu onto the Communist project, a

Cold War narrative structure endures, imposing a continual need for Romanians to

prove they have moved beyond their backward socialist past. In the case of the Light

Revolution, by appealing to the West for salvation, and by utilizing new forms of

technology, #Rezist protestors attempted to restage the death of Ceaușescu, imagining

that this time, they could effectively lustrate their backwardness and thereby enter the

global time of postsocialist neoliberalism. Yet this was not the first restaging of

Ceaușescu’s death in an attempt to reach the vanishing point of normality. In 2003,

the artist Dumitru Gorzo famously stenciled images of Ceaușescu across Bucharest

with the text, “VIN ÎN 5 MINUTE (Back in 5 Minutes),” inferring fear that the

former leader would return despite his ’89 execution (Pusca 2016, 32). In 2010, this

phobia manifested in the Ceaușescus’ bodies being unearthed for DNA testing, just to

make sure that they were truly dead. As such, the Light Revolution can be read as part

of longer lineage of anticommunist restaging.

However, unlike past reenactments, the Light Revolution brought young

people into the physical spaces that their parents stood in 1989. As one man’s placard

in Piața Victoriei spelled out, also in English, “WE WILL STAND OUR GROUND

LIKE OUR PARENTS DID IN ’89.” This mimicry, strongest amongst the young

aspirational middle class, presumes that contemporary government corruption is

linked to failed post-1989 lustration. This framing erases the role that the West has

164

played both in Romania’s contemporary economic hardships vis-a-vis postsocialist

disaster capitalism, and in the formation of Romanian middle-class aspirational

subjectivities (Țichindeleanu 2017). It also undermines a rich history of post-1989

protests, from those against crony capitalism of the 1990s, the 2008 anti-NATO

organizing, the 2012 anti-austerity protests (sparked by outrage against a healthcare

reform), and the anti-globalization Roșia Montana demonstrations of 2013.

Anticorruption framing in Romania is important to theorize alongside that

within other postsocialist countries, from Slovenia to Bosnia. While in some

postsocialist contexts, anticorruption protests align with anti-authoritarian and anti-

capitalist politics, in others, they have stymied movements by positing conservative

regime change as solution. As Yurchak argues, narratives of corruption also have the

power to divorce a country from its geopolitical contexts, “reducing it to a zone that is

subjected to its own internal logic of authoritarianism” (2017, 3). The fascination with

corruption is endemic to postsocialist Romania, where more politicians have been

jailed for corruption over the past decade than in all of Eastern Europe combined,

often rounded up by the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), a body founded in

2005 by an EU directive. In fact, the Light Revolution erupted after Dragnea’s

government introduced a bill that would decriminalize bribes up to £38,865, a

political move that sparked outrage among a corruption-obsessed population.

However, what is of interest here is less ongoing governmental corruption, but

rather the obsession with cleansing the nation of corrupt politicians (rather than of

multinational corporations) to collectively advance into the European body (imagined

as anti-corrupt). As Alexander Clapp articulates,

165

One of the great successes of the DNA has been its ability to use middle-class

protests to control Europe’s vision of Romania today. Those who join the

street movements admire it out of a mixture of naivety and fear of what

Romania has been. It is a generation whose memory of communism is that of

the austerity decade into which they were born, and who were raised in the

wild-turf capitalism of the 1990s. Not only has their prosperity come from the

influx of multinationals, whose CEOs now take to the streets with them in

protest; so have many of their progressive values (2017).

Yet while the DNA, supported by NATO, rounds up politicians in the name of

European liberalism, its jurisdiction does not extend to multinational corporations,

which arguably are most responsible for contexts of postsocialist economic

devastation. As CrimethInc authors contextualize, “Anti-corruption discourse has

served to rally people to coordinate their own colonization and exploitation by

Western capitalists in the name of anti-communism” (Anonymous 2017).

Romanian protests of the last five years have witnessed not only an increased

neoliberal fervor among participants, but also an increased anticorruption politic

pivoted against the Red Plague of the PSD. This sentiment grew in 2015, when

protests broke out after an accidental and deadly fire in the nightclub, Colectiv.

Protestors blamed the government for dodging the regulating of permits and incited

the resignation of then PSD Prime Minister Victor Ponta. Anti-PSD sentiment was

further flamed in early 2017 after the party won the national election. While the PSD

166

is undoubtedly corrupt, mafiaistic, and neoliberal in its core, so is the rival party that

many #Rezist protestors support—the National Liberal Party (Partidul Național

Liberal/PNL). If anything, the main difference between these two dominant rival

parties—the PSD the party of the current government, and the PNL that of the current

president—is that the PSD enjoys most of its support from rural, poor, small-town,

and senior populations, and the PNL from millennial urbanites. This is not to say that

the PSD represents the poor—far from it—but at times, it has worked for a patriarchal

system of redistribution that at least partially benefits them (Poenaru 2017).

Meanwhile the PNL is understood as “more European,” parading a president, Klaus

Iohannis that many speculate won the election based upon his ethnic German

heritage, supposedly signifying his “inherent Western superiority.” While PSD

supporters did organize counter demonstrations outside of the main stage of police-

protected protestors, many of whom were likely paid, they nevertheless were met

with violence by #Rezistors, who launched anticommunist virulence against them.

Yet #Rezistors were largely praised for their positivity in the media, also

enjoying support from multinational corporations who gave their employees time off

to attend. The Jandarmeria, Romania’s military police, was made famous for holding

heart-shaped balloons at the protests, and even the head of Raiffeisen Bank attended a

demonstration in Cluj with his family. Meanwhile, McDonalds offered protestors free

tea so that they could stay warm and rehydrate, and Iohannis himself participated in

the demonstrations early on. At one point, a US state department representative

described the protests as a “sea of humanity” to a cohort of US students new to

Romania, praising that there was nothing anarchistic or antiglobal about them. As he

167

extoled, even though Piața Victoriei is surrounded by big banks, none of them had

their windows smashed, and everyone respected the police.

Romania’s Light Revolution, while creating a safe space for police, banks,

nationalism, and even the president, did not create any semblance of safety for

antifascist organizers, who have been increasingly marginalized in anticorruption

demonstrations over the last five years. Often when antifascist and anti-capitalist

groups attend contemporary these protests, they are scoffed at by more liberal

protestors and told to take down their banners—a far leap from the anti-NATO and

anti-austerity protests of years earlier. By barring antifascist and anti-capitalist

protestors, the space of protest becomes safer not only for banks and police but also

far right members of the Nouă Dreapta (New Right) and the homophobic Coaliția

pentru Familie (Coalition for the Family). As such, arguably the liberalization and

depoliticization of public space enable the growth of fascism and its

homophobic/techno-normative ethos.

This trend is deeply connected to Romanian urban property history, one that

preceded the Communist socialist era, yet that today is reinterpreted through zombie

socialism liberalization of and shifting understandings of private and public space. It

was during the interwar era that Bucharest saw the “golden age” of urban

development, becoming known by many as the “Little Paris of the East.” This was

also the age of intensified fascism, marked by intense anti-Roma and anti-Semitic

racism. The Communist regime arose to squash the fascist movement and the

classism that backed it. Soon after, the party initiated an intensive urbanization

project, including a housing nationalization policy. Mandating that owners of multiple

168

properties give up excess units, the state moved new residents in, including the

racialized poor. Most of this occurred in older city centers, while new socialist

modernist buildings were erected in the semiperipheries (Chelcea 2012). Decades

later, after transition, EU-supported urban housing restitution policies were

implemented to return formerly nationalized buildings to descendants of prior

owners. Interpreting Communism socialism as aberration, retrocession laws have

thereby facilitated the reclamation of former wealth. Significantly, this has incited a

widespread trend of racial evictions in urban centers (Vincze 2017).

As postsocialist restitution signified a technofascist return to pre-socialist

wealth and the valorization of private property, so did an emergent architectural

heritage movement, one that initially rose against capitalist interests, but that soon

became absorbed by them, as well as by veneration of fascist times. By glossing

through the movement here, I specifically aim to highlight the modes in which it

prefigures the liberalism of the Light Revolution. By the late 1990s, real estate

speculators discovered Bucharest, wrecked by transition, as an easily exploitative

space, and unofficial development became orchestrated outside of official city plans.

As Ioana Florea finds, architects, planners, and proponents of urban beautification

understood this orchestration as part of “derogatory urbanism,” fearing that new

development would destroy golden era architecture. Relatively small protests

emerged in 2005 and 2006 to protect old buildings, led by architects and students,

some of whom soon formed NGOs. Expressing pre-socialist nostalgia, these groups

framed themselves as a cultural movement backed by expert knowledge. Soon

conservative and nationalist groups desirous of reinstalling pre-socialist urban

169

identity joined in, and by 2008, the Association to Save Bucharest (Asociatia Salvaţi

Bucureştiul/ASB) Party emerged. 2008 and 2009 saw frequent small protests outside

of the parliament, which included mock funerals mourning the loss of historic

buildings while mocking corrupt officials. However, rather, than mourn those being

dispossessed from their homes through property restitution, this growing heritage

movement was more concerned with pre-socialist buildings and symbolic capital. In

2015, the ASB grew into the Union to Save Romania (Uniunea Salvaţi

România/USR), led by mathematician Nicușor Dan, an increasingly public figure.

The party has established itself as one of the strongest in the administration, and now

is the second most popular in Bucharest, after the PNL. Anti-corruption is one of its

central tenets, and numerous USR supporters made up Light Revolution constituents.

The interests of this heritage movement grew visibility in 2010, when the City

Hall obtained the right to construct a “North–South middle line” through Bucharest—

a throughway project first conceived of in the 1930s intended to connect the

Government at Victoriei to the Parliament further south, widening the streets along

Buzești-Berzei. When implemented, this project led to the destruction of 98 buildings

and the evacuation of 1,000 people in the Matache neighborhood, most of whom were

Roma. While anti-eviction protests did transpire, most of the resistance to the project

was instead led by the heritage movement, upset about the destruction of the 100-

year-old Matache market.

For instance, in a film made Dragoș Lumpan to commemorate the loss, those

displaced by the development project were only mentioned peripherally. Instead,

most prominently featured were architects and planners bemoaning the corruption of

170

the former and corrupt major, Sorin Oprescu, who saw the project through. As several

architectures argued, the problem is that Oprescu and the planners that implemented it

are just “little Ceaușescus” who think that they can redevelop and cut through the

city, however they like, destroying historical value. In a screening of the film,

Lumpan made similar remarks, grieving the loss of the market while referring to

those displaced with overtly anti-Roma, anti-queer, and anti-sex-worker language. In

the words of Ann Stoler:

There are resurrected ruins, like those . . . part of the World Bank–UNESCO

cultural heritage projects designed to “harvest the economic value” and

capitalize on the allure of partially restored people and things. Such

restorations disperse and redistribute people, making their ways of being vital

to national development and productive of new inequalities. Then there are

those ruins that stirred Jamaica Kincaid’s derisive and angry view of Antigua,

marked with buildings whose faded placards note “repairs pending” for

decades, while damaged but “splendid old buildings from colonial times” are

well maintained in carefully tended disrepair (2008, 198).

This aligns with Yukiko Koga’s understanding of “colonial inheritance” of Japanese

imperialism in China, what she describes as the “capitalization of colonial remnants”

such as architecture and factories (2016, 3). As Lumpan’s film well reveals, pre-

socialist and socialist-era ruins are bestowed differential values, inferring different

futures of inheritance.

171

The tension between pre-socialist aesthetic value and the livelihood of those

dispossessed by postsocialist the installation of such value came to a head in 2012,

when an old building in the city center, Carol 53, was bestowed historic value and

granted both restitution and restoration. The heir, a famous architect and senior

member of the heritage movement, evicted a large Roma family who had been

squatting there for years. He then handed the building over to a collective of young

artists and architects, who began a “cultural” co-living/working project, describing

themselves as “squatters,” giving presentations and tours within and beyond

Romania. Florea argues that Carol 53 perfectly represents the violence of the heritage

movement: “With ‘Little Paris’ being negotiated as its identity symbol and its vision

of what is valuable, the movement found itself in a process of excluding all those

groups not fitting into or not adhering to this cultural value system—such as the poor,

the Roma, the uneducated, the less educated, the less urbanized dwellers” (2016, 74).

This cultural value system is often shared by those protesting the Red Scare in Piața

Victoriei, a plaza incidentally now more connected to the Parliament, thanks to the

Buzești-Berzei development, and more well known to the West, thanks to the sea of

smartphones lights beaming outward.

Indeed, the Western liberal media received Light Revolution light-wave

transmissions instantaneously. Uncritically, outlets ranging from Al Jazeera and

Democracy Now to the New York Times reported on the sea of humanity bearing its

face across Romania. Focusing on the massive show of force against the corrupt

government, the media was not shy in implying that if Romanians could take to the

streets in such strong numbers, surely US Trump dissenters could as well. If Rezist

172

was initially inspired by Resist, now Resistors should, it seemed, gain inspiration

from Rezistors. This aspirational dialecticism marks an emerging paradox in liberal

teleology, one endemic to its anticommunist condition. How, if postsocialist Romania

has been conditioned by the West to be inherently behind, can its cultures of dissent

be suddenly read as more progressive?

Of importance here is that both Rezist and Resist protests pin down a timeline

that understands progress as a move from authoritarianism toward liberalism, per

Singh’s analysis. In the case of Romania, allegations of authoritarianism are used to

directly scapegoat the Communist past as source of blame for current conditions of

austerity, corruption, and “backwardness,” rather than the violence and failures of

disaster capitalism. To reverse this postsocialist retrograde, a return to Little Paris

golden era is posited as one solution, while adaptation into the contemporary Western

body is offered as another. Both of course ultimately link back to longstanding desires

to become Europe. Meanwhile, in the US, liberal democrats blame Russian

interference for Trump’s victory, often borrowing Cold War grammars and projecting

neo-McCarthyistic hysteria to pin down their case against illiberal hacking

interference. Massive street protests backed by technological prowess in public space,

proponents of liberal democracy allege, are one means of moving away from

authoritarianism and toward liberal futurity. As Bruce O’Neill suggests, “But as those

standing in the squares across Romania maintained, there is a deeper threat that can

all too easily get lost amid the rhythm of everyday life: corruption kills. Rather than

wait to be swept up in the collateral damage, those in the West would be wise to

follow Romania’s lead and demand rigorous accountability” (2018). Light

173

Revolutions, in other words, are part of a larger neoliberal arsenal determined to

militate against postliberal possibilities by enticing post-Enlightenment dreams.

Further, they entangle with pre-socialist, fascist “Golden Era” imaginaries, harkening

to the postsocialist advent of technofascism.

The Timpuri Noi (New Times) of IKEA

In this last section, I delve into the liberal logics undergirding rural forest

restitutions, teasing out how the zombie socialism that they rest upon is also tethered

to urban renewal processes. I focus upon the role of the Swedish IKEA furniture

company/real estate investor in rural and urban space alike. By disentangling its web

of connections, and by reading the language of postsocialist restitution and renewal

together, I question why Roma and Communist specters alike are interpreted as

zombies by zombie socialist protest movements, while companies like IKEA are seen

as means to Western modernity. Why is it that IKEA, while just as “corrupt” as

Gabriel, and perhaps even more technocapitalist in both rural and urban spaces alike,

it maintains the veneer of “progressive,” “modern,” and salvific in the popular

imaginary? Why have protestors rushed to condemn Gabriel and the PSD, but IKEA,

a techno-imperial monolith with fascist origins, is left alone? It seems that in

postsocialist liberal times, the logics of technocapitalism, what is understood as a

means to “development” remains “unprotestable.” Romania contains two-thirds of

Europe’s virgin forests and the continent’s largest brown bear, lynx, and grey wolf

populations. In 1984, it was determined that Romania contained 400,000 hectares of

old-growth trees; twenty years later, in 2004, there were only 218,500 remaining

174

(Veen et al., 2010). A major wave of destruction took place after 1995, and then

another later, after 2005, correlating with the passing of restitution laws. As of 2009,

up to 45 percent of previously national forests were restituted and therefore

privatized, and it is predicted that soon two-thirds of all forests will be privatized

(Abrudan et al. 2009; Ioras and Abrudan 2006).

As in urban spaces, Roma residents bear the brunt of rural restitution far more

than non-Roma. Like mining and Siliconization alike, forest clearcutting too is a form

of racial technocapitalism. Not only were Roma dispossessed from collectivized

agricultural and industrial projects after 1989, but further, under the pretext of land

shortage, many Roma were denied the half a hectare of land otherwise gifted to

socialist collective farm employees (Stewart 2002, 135). In forested regions such as

Dragomiresți in Dâmboviţa County, despite that Roma had been working in the

forests for generations, including during socialism, they received neither agricultural

nor forest land after 1989 as they had not owned the land beforehand (Sikor et al.

2009, 183). Thus in 2003, they began illegally cutting large timber (rather than simply

gathering underbrush for broom making and firewood as they had been doing

previously), selling it to wholesalers in southern Romania for profit. In response, new

forest owners have mobilized anti-Roma racial stereotypes, declaring that Roma

“should be killed since they are not good for anything else but stealing our forest”

(quoted in Sikor et al. 2009, 184). Thus, as with urban restitution, the racist histories

that preceded 1946 have been invoked after 1989 to pathologize Roma for never

having been pre-socialist landowners – punishing and further racializing them for

slavery and its after effects. While large lumber companies, the Orthodox Church,

175

and real estate mafia collectives benefit from privatization, buying up small plots

from former owners, many of whom are poor, for profit, the Swedish IKEA furniture

company profits most.

IKEA, one of the planet’s largest furniture suppliers, is said to use one percent

of global wood supply each year to produce roughly 100 million pieces “smart”

furniture (Bojin et al. 2016). IKEA was founded by the then 17-year old Ingvar

Kamprad in 1943. Kamprad passed away in early 2018 as one of the world’s

wealthiest people. The same year that he founded IKEA, naming it after his initials as

well as his childhood farm (Elmtaryd) and village (Agunnaryd), he became Member

No. 4,014 of the Swedish fascist party, Socialist Unity. There, he emerged as an

enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer, contributing to party meetings even after World War II

ended, recruiting and fundraising for it (Asbrink 2018). He also maintained ties with

the Swedish fascist leader Per Engdahl, who he publicly supported even in 2011.9

Since its 1943 origins, IKEA has expanded across the globe, today owning

and operates 415 stores in 49 countries. It also owns TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-

based gig-economy platform known, like Uber, to exploit workers and deny them

benefits. Aimed to “revolutionize the world’s labor force,” the company, a 2008

startup founded by a former IBM software engineer, not only exploits its own

“Taskers,” but further has been shown to racially discriminate against potential clients

(Butler 2017). In this way, the roots of the company, laden in fascism, have laid the

bedrock for its techno-imperial present. Like other tech companies, IKEA offshores

its financing through complex networks, allegedly avoiding paying one billion euro in

taxes between 2010 and 2016 (Chee 2016). In addition, it is part of entangled

176

property networks, some of which are also designed to maximize profit and exploit

Romanian forests, which I elaborate upon here.

While IKEA sets the bar for chic modernist smart home décor, racial

technocapitalism, and techno-imperial practices, Harvard University also stands in for

US political and academic superiority, having produced eight US presidents. And

somehow, both IKEA and Harvard became embroiled in Romanian courts for illegal

forest restitution investments. The business dealings between the two mega entities

are muddy and complex, endemic to the age of property financialization, but also to

postsocialist restitution schemas and what Verdery describes as post-1989 “fuzzy

property rights” (1999). While today blame is placed upon corrupt individuals

involved in the dealings, here I argue that it is more productive to focus upon how

restitutions are processes designed to benefit the West and Western aspirations while

reinstating fascist relations, coded in the language of technoliberalism.

Investigative work by Daniel Bojin, Paul Radu, Hans Strandberg (2016) has

found that Harvard and IKEA began their tryst in 2004, when Harvard designated a

Romanian man from Sohodol, Dragoș Lipan, as its land purchasing business

representative. On the same day that Harvard employed Lipan in Sohodol, a

commercial company Oriolus Limited, came into being, established by four Swedes

who authorized Lipan’s first land purchase. In 2010, Harvard became the largest

private owner of forests in Romania, managing over $100 million of Romanian

investments through the Boston-based tax-exempt Phemus Corporation. Eventually,

some of Lipan’s dealings surfaced as illegal, and so to extricate itself, Harvard set up

a new business scheme, funneling transactions through Delaware, Luxembourg,

177

Sweden, and Romania. Then, in 2015, after Lipan was sentenced for corruption,

Harvard brusquely sold the majority of its property to IKEA in what became its

largest transaction in raw forest, valued at $62.6 million (Bojin et al. 2016).10 Today,

IKEA owns 90 forests in 21 Romanian counties, totaling 33,000 hectares. The trees in

these forests are now slated to become smart furniture, sold around the globe,

including in Romania.

Bucharest is currently in the process of building its second IKEA store, and

Timișoara already has one. But nevertheless, most of Romania’s forests are not slated

to be transformed into Romanian furniture, unlike during socialism when furniture

production and sales largely remained domestic affairs. Bojin, Radu, and Strandberg

attribute the Harvard-IKEA phenomenon to corruption, in which “crooked

businessmen and dirty politicians seized the moment, forging documents and

claiming forests that had never belonged to them or to their ancestors. In many cases,

fake relatives armed with piles of forged paperwork claimed some of the last standing

old-growth forests in Europe and quickly sold them to foreign companies who poured

tens of millions of dollars into such deals hoping for great returns” (2016). However,

arguably the Harvard-IKEA transactions are not so out of the ordinary and rather, as

with Gabriel, indexical of techno-imperialism in postsocialist contexts.

However, even during socialism, IKEA and Romania maintained a complex

relationship. Declassified files at the National College for Studying the Securitate

Archives have shown that IKEA had made an agreement in 1981 with the Romanian

state-run timber company, Tehnoforestexport, to be overcharged for products

produced in Romania (Rosca 2014). The Securitate utilized a special foreign trade

178

company, ICE Dunarea, to skim capital from the transactions. A 1986 memo from the

“Ministry of Interior, Department of State Security, Military Unit 0544,” marked

“Top Secret, sole copy,” elaborates that the “Scandinavica currency collection

operation" emerged "with the aim of receiving foreign currency through over-billing

the payments made in the contract between ICE Tehnoforestexport with IKEA of

Sweden, valued at 97m Swedish crowns (13.6m US dollars).” In addition, “IKEA

transferred in our transitory account the sum of 163,005.201 Swedish crowns.” Other

documents show overseas payments made to a bank in East Berlin, where, during the

Cold War, IKEA forced East German political prisoners to produce and assemble

products (Connolly 2012). Allegedly, per Scandinavica, Operation Securitate would

pay IKEA back, accruing large interest sums along the way. IKEA claims to have

seen the transaction as a sort of commission (Rosca 2014), a practice today that

Rezist protestors would rally against as corruption.

However, unlike resistance to Gabriel via Salvați Roșia Montană, there have

been no massive urban street protests to challenge techno-imperial forestry and

postsocialist rural restitutions. While Greenpeace is actively fighting back, as is the

smaller activist-based Eco Ruralis Association in Cluj, and while investigative

journalists from projects such as RISE are documenting forest corruption, there is no

massive movement aimed against IKEA. Several environmental activists have told

me that lack of widescale organizing around forest restitutions and land-grabbing

more broadly can in part be attributed to a dominant narrative that understands

restitutions as a means of postsocialist transitional justice, and in part to the large

concentration of anti-capitalist activists in urban centers too removed from rural

179

contexts.

Others have described the love affair that Romania has with IKEA, in which

the company’s smart furniture is read as a means of urban modernity and

technological savviness. While there was no natural affinity to Gabriel or its mineral

products, IKEA is a different story, friends have described. Even if IKEA is not

offering Romania reparations for stolen trees and consequential ecological

devastation, IKEA still offers the aesthetic dream of Western modernity, now

available online and in urban retail stores. Having spent days in IKEA’s branch near

the Bucharest airport observing transactions and talking to customers in the store’s

relatively affordable canteen, I’ve heard countless tales of people taking the long trip

there on the 783 bus just to hang out and eat a meal, and maybe to buy something

small downstairs. One middle-aged man told me that he loves going to IKEA because

his family had no furniture options during socialism, and now he can transform his

socialist-built flat into any interior style that he so chooses, as long as the components

are in IKEA. Yet most people can’t afford IKEA’s furniture products, but still enjoy

being in their proximity. “It’s like going to the mall,” several people mentioned,

alluding to the array of malls that sprung up in Bucharest in the early 2000s. Filled

with Western clothing stores, Starbucks coffee shops, Belgian-owned Mega Image

grocery stores, and more, the malls themselves have become postsocialist and at times

gentrifying spaces that people go to for proximity to unaffordable products and

lifestyle fantasies. Many malls also have World Class gyms, also founded in Sweden,

which have aggressively targeted the Eastern European market after socialism.

While IKEA’s techno-imperialism in Romania’s forests may be rendered non-

180

threatening through the company’s urban aesthetic appeal, it has found more material

ways of rendering itself as salvific in Bucharest’s postsocialist urban renewal.

Beginning in 2008, Interprime Properties the investment fund, which is part of IKEA,

fixed its eyes on socialist-era industrial sites that it hoped to redevelop into high-end

office buildings, mostly for tech. In 2010, the 53,000 square meter plot that was once

the Timpuri Noi (New Times, also New Age) Industrial Platform and Metal Works,

was purchased by Interprime Properties for 34.6 million euro. First established during

the second half of the 19th century, the Timpuri Noi factory was an industrial

stronghold during socialism, producing compressors, pumps, plant materials, and the

country’s only small and medium capacity compressors (Moga and David, 2010). To

facilitate worker transport, Bucharest’s first metro line opened in 1979 to connect

Timpuri Noi with Semănătoarea (now rebranded as Petrache Poenaru), then the city’s

industrial agricultural hub. Today, Semănătoarea mostly functions as Sema Park, an

IT office complex. Like Semănătoarea factories, Timpuri Noi Metal Works struggled

to survive post-1989. There were 2,700 employees working for the company in 1990;

in 2011, there were only 130 remaining (Cojocar 2011; Moga and David 2010).

Withering, in 2010, it relocated to Jilava, 40 kilometers outside of Bucharest, placing

the land and crumbling buildings on the market.

Like with forest restitutions, the financial mechanisms behind IKEA’s urban

redevelopment are complex and entangled, characteristic of global capital

technologies of ownership. Interprime Properties, owned by the Inter-IKEA Group

and the Inter-IKEA Property Division, was founded Kamprad in 1989. Since then it

has been conducting real estate transactions in Europe, in both postsocialist and

181

Western countries, offshoring capital in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg,

Switzerland, Curaçao, the Virgin Islands, and Cyprus (The Local 2011). In 2014,

Interprime became Vastint Romania S.R.L., a subsidiary of Vastint Holding B.V., the

latter the holding company of the holding company of the Inter IKEA Property

Division. “Vastint” is technically an abbreviation for “Vastgoed Internationaal,”

which means “International Real Estate” in Dutch. The Swiss Interogo Foundation

now owns both Vastint and the IKEA group, which Kamprad secretly created in 1989

to hold his company’s assets (The Local 2011).

Today, what was once the Timpuri Noi Industrial Platform has been

demolished and redeveloped into Timpuri Noi Square, flashing the Vastint logo on

one of its tall glass towers. Everything took a bit longer than planned in part because

three buildings from Timpuri Noi Metalworks could not be demolished due their

heritage status (Chelcea 2015, 194). Soon enough though, the heritage buildings

vanished, presumably “collapsing in on themselves” as is often the case in such

scenarios. Two of the site’s three buildings were inaugurated in 2017, and by 2018,

they had reached a 90 percent occupancy rating. Mostly rented by IT companies,

financial services, and professional services, companies include Go Pro, Sephora,

VWR International, Phoenix Contact, Kruk, Kiss FM, Fratelli, Impact Hub, DCS

Plus, Netcentric, Tremend and Zitec. Roughly 3,000 IT specialists now work there,

and more will join soon after the third office building is completed. Meanwhile,

Vastint has launched two other development projects in the city—the Bucharest

Business Garden and a new site in Şişeşti.

Having lived nearby the Timpuri Noi complex for over two years during my

182

fieldwork in Romania, I saw it transform dramatically. Numerous residential

buildings have been modernized in the otherwise working-class neighborhood

between Timpuri Noi and Vitan. Seemingly overnight, in 2018, numerous food trucks

began showing up during lunch offering sushi, burgers, and more. It is not working-

class factory workers queuing up for expensive truck food as with the surrounding

canteens of the former Metalworks. Meanwhile rents have gone up in the

neighborhood, while the lawn across Timpuri Noi Square maintains a manicured

aesthetic otherwise out-of-joint in the region.

Even though there is ample evidence of IKEA’s “corruption” in Romania,

both pre and post-1989, in both rural and urban spaces alike, protests and cultures of

dissent have been minimal at best. The heritage buildings that collapsed were not the

site of heritage preservation protests, and the forest dealings between IKEA, Harvard,

and the state are largely under the radar. Outside of a handful of housing and

environmental justice activists, I’ve never heard any critique of IKEA, its history, or

its involvement in urban restructuring and gentrification. Why is it that Roșia

Montană protests arose to mobilize the urban masses, and why did those same people

not rise up in the name of forest defense? Why are Rezistors targeting corrupt PSD

politicians but not techno-imperialism, which depletes the country’s resources leading

to economic contexts in which corruption becomes one of many responses? Singing

of corruption in Nigeria, the artist Falz (Folarin Falana) suggests, “We operate a

predatory, neo-colonial capitalist system, which is founded on fraud and exploitation.

And therefore, we are bound to have corruption institutionalized” (qtd. in Ogundoro

2018). As much as this holds true in Nigeria, so does it in Romania. And arguably, so

183

does it in the United States. However, when looking to cultures of protest and

“Rezistance,” it is important to theorize the ways in which liberalism and zombie

socialism operate to keep revolution a distant fantasy, one increasingly

incomprehensible in Piața Victoriei and beyond where anti-capitalist sentiment is read

as retrograde in Romania’s modernizing project.

Stoler suggests, “Globalization may account for the dumping of toxic waste

on the Ivory Coast but not the trajectory of its movement and the history that made

west Africa a suitable and available site. Again, there are ruins of empire that are

called ‘ruins’ as well as those that are not” (2008, 204). What are the ruins of

postsocialist disaster capitalism as it entangles with Western techno-imperialism?

Why is it that Romania has been slated as a place of extraction for the West, and why

is it that Western fantasies keep possibilities of dissent at bay? Unlike Gabriel, IKEA

after all is transforming Romania’s techno-urban landscapes along with rural ones.

And yet, IKEA has also entangled with people’s domestic spaces and

imaginaries in aspirational forms, engendering new forms of intimacy with the West.

While Timpuri Noi Square, the alleged new heart of Bucharest, is undoubtedly

connected to contexts of urban racial technocapitalism, instantiating new forms of

gentrification, racial banishment, and socialist-era technological dispossession,

zombie socialism holds the transformation in place, promising techno-utopic futures

and new forms of what we might understand as a form of intimacy with the West. By

this I mean promises of proximity through technological forms and fantasies, from

pilgrimages to IKEA’s store to the placement of its products, many of which are

made of Romanian lumber vis-à-vis IKEA’s own techno-imperialism, in one’s home,

184

dreams and materialities run deep. These fantasies and furniture worlds obviate the

violence that the company produces, locally and globally.

Impossible Spaces

During the summer of 2018, a new wave of Rezist protests began to percolate

in hot Bucharest streets. These, while supported by Rezistors, also became known as

the Diaspora protests, or the Muie PSD. Provoked by ongoing PSD policies and laws

deemed corrupt, these protests embraced Western values and Western technology

even more so than the original Light Revolution protests of a year earlier. They were

in part incited when a Romanian living in Sweden, Razvan Stefanescu, drove his

Swedish-registered Audi to Bucharest with a license plate reading Muie PSD, slang

for PSD cocksuckers. Muie technically comes from Romani, meaning mouth or to

deceive, but non-Roma Romanians have been using it for decades as a perversion,

often deracinated from its Roma origins. I’ve seen graffiti on numerous trains spell

out Muie țiganilor, or “Gypsy cocksuckers,” racist, racially appropriative, and

homophobic all at once.

Upon arriving in Romania, Stefanescu was pulled over by the police, who

confiscated his license plates claiming their invalidity. As they were valid throughout

the EU, according to Sweden, this sparked an outrage, and a new resentment towards

the police amongst the aspiring middle-class. The Diaspora protest, also marked by

light shows and laser displays, took place on August 10, 2018, organized as an

invitation for Romanians living abroad to return to Bucharest and demonstrate their

dismay at the country’s corruption and more specifically, at the Muie PSD. The

185

protest of what was estimated to be roughly 70,000 people began non-violently,

though I counted dozens and dozens of people with signs in Piața Victoriei depicting

protestors raping the government, all hypermasculine and heteronormative. Others

waved flags from their new countries, from the UK to the US. Others denounced the

Red Plague, and someone even held a poster showing an evolution of socialists from

Marx to Lenin to Dragnea. The only anti-police banner that I saw framed the police as

corrupt for having confiscated Stefanescu’s license plate. Meanwhile, as in other

Rezist protests, images circulated of Dragnea and PSD members in white and black

striped jail suits, reveling in carceral aesthetics.

The jandarmerie (military police) did begin spraying tear gas and protesters

early into the night, and by 10pm, tensions erupted with the riot police throwing

canisters into the masses, injuring up to 450 people. The internet subsequently

exploded, mostly with people chiding the now violent PSD. En masse, people flooded

the Gendarmerie’s Facebook page, giving it one-star ratings, displaying their

disapproval. However, other observers were sure that the violence was an inside job

orchestrated by the PNL or even USR to take down the PSD, as in the past the PSD

had always supported protests such as the Diaspora. Regardless of conspiracy

theories, what is significant here is that the protestors, framed as good Romanians

working abroad, were again portrayed as technologically advanced, while the PSD

was framed as backwards, homosexual, and corrupt. Images erupted of smartphone

displays spelling out Muie PSD to mark the technological prowess of Romanians.

Another image circulated on Facebook of screenshot of Google’s Waze mapping

application, in which somehow the tile of the web-map itself had been hacked to read

186

Muie PSD outside of Iași. The caption read, in Romanian, “So I’m discussing with

the Taxify taxi driver about tomorrow's protests outside of the government, and he

invites me to look up Carrefour in Iași with Waze. I zoomed in upon the map.

Priceless. Here’s how Romanians are good at IT.” Techno-normativity is expressed in

numerous ways.

While Muie PSD/Diaspora is the latest incantation of Rezist in Bucharest,

there have been other eruptions in other Romanian cities since the first Light

Revolution protests of early 2017. And repeatedly, these brush up against antiracist

and anti-capitalist organizing, at times working against it. In December 2017, for

instance, a small group of anti-eviction organizers gathered in Cluj to mark the seven-

year anniversary of a mass eviction that displaced over 300 Roma residents from the

city center and forcibly relocated them to the local garbage dump outside of town.

Gathering outside of Piața Unirii, the 75 or so protesters, many of whom had

made their way back to the city from the waste site to advocate for antiracist social

housing policies, were swallowed up in a mass of 3,000 Rezistors, still chanting

against thievery, corruption, and Communism. While the housing justice protestors

endured, eventually crawling out from the “sea of humanity” encompassing them,

questions emerge as to what futures public space may hold when absorbed

postsocialist neoliberalism. If liberal-oriented public square demonstrations have now

become absorbed by light, colorful versions of zombie socialism, Western

aspirational politics, and dissent against politicians rather than global capital, what

liberatory future does public space still hold, if any? Unlike the public square that

captured radical hopes a decade earlier across the globe, from the Indignados

187

movement to Tahrir Square, the contemporary postsocialist square has become one

not of emancipatory politics but of neoliberal futurity. While Francis Fukuyama’s

“end of history” never arrived after the collapse of the Berlin Wall—due to the

proliferation of anti-capitalist alterities that have refused the time and space of post-

Cold War neoliberal globality—it seems that, just as capitalism endeavors to absorb

all that it can, public space protests now are fighting to finally materialize

Fukuyama’s post-Cold War vision.

In the Western left, public space, or the commons, is still largely understood

as an anti-capitalist geography worth fighting for. Theorized as a symbolic and

material remnant of pre-capitalism, occupying and maintaining the commons is

understood as a radical and necessary gesture in resisting the gentrification of urban

space and the forces of privatization. But what happens when these very forces

occupy the public square, protesting socialism’s endurance rather than heeding to

calls made by those dispossessed by the ravages of postsocialist neoliberalism? As

has been evidenced in Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania, both the public

square and the mass protest have increasingly become coopted by Western

aspirational fantasies of privatization and pre-socialist “golden eras” rather than those

of anti-capitalist and antifascist futures. It is this that paves the way for fascism to

take hold. If the West is to look toward the East for illiberal prefiguration, it is

imperative to look at the conditions than enable fascism rather than fall into the

ahistorical trap that understands fascism as endemic to socialist/postsocialist Eastern

Europe. And in Eastern Europe, if the liberal fantasy of public space and mass protest

liberates nothing except global capital and fascism, perhaps it is time to imagine

188

dissent outside of the impossible space of the commons, refraining from dreams of

transparency and enlightenment and instead embracing more covert, obscure, and

commonist tactics.

189

Chapter 4: Postsocialism, Technofascism, and the Tech Boom 2.0: From Technologies of Racial/spatial Dispossession to the Dark Enlightenment

It was in the midst of what in retrospect has been described as the “Battle of

Berkeley,” or intensified conflicts between fascists and antifascists in Berkeley,

California, in 2017, that the San Francisco Bay Area became a central spot on the

map of growing right-wing organizing in the US. Following the presidential electoral

victory of real estate mogul Donald J. Trump in 2016, numerous far-right, “alt-right,”

“alt-light,” and other fascistic groups stockpiled white supremacist momentum far

and wide. Berkeley, but also other Bay Area cities such as San Francisco and

Oakland, emerged as key nodes in a growing constellation of far-right organizing but

also antifascist resistance. Just as many people in the US, particularly those espousing

more liberal politics, never expected Trump to actually win the election given the

overt racism and sexism that he spewed throughout most of his campaign, very few

people anticipated that the post-Cold War Bay Area would become a hub of fascist

organizing. After all, while conflicts are nothing new in the region, particularly in the

midst of the contemporary tech boom and the contexts of heightened racial

dispossession that it incites, the region remains an area largely dominated by one

liberal political party, where skirmishes between liberals and the radical left are

presumed more likely than those between fascists and antifascists.

Rather than spectacularize the unexpectedness of the Bay Area upon an ever-

shifting map of right-wing centralities here, rather I theorize the Bay Area, as post-

Cold War Silicon Valley’s urban backyard, as in fact constitutive of the rise of racial

190

technocapitalism and technofascism. By these, I refer to the ways in which racism

and fascism materialize Silicon Valley technocapitalist urbanity. Here I accord with

Mark Forman’s analysis that “The capital-F Fascism of authoritarian government is

possible because of the lower case-f fascism that thrives in everyday life under

capitalism” (2017). By this, he points to state-centered bureaucracy manufactured to

produce obedience. But also, as he suggests, “Fascists march to war down roads that

were paved by centuries of European colonialism and imperialism. The fascist

discourse of national greatness is nothing more than a continuation of the nationalism

of the imagined community constructed by the bourgeoisie.” Yet with imperialism

now alive and well in the heart of post-Cold War Silicon Valley (Silicon Valley

imperialism) and its landscapes of racial technocapitalism, fascism is being

reconstituted in novel ways. Further, as Chris Wright observes (2017), in the 1930s, it

was the power of labor organizing that kept the New Deal US from taking a fascist

turn. Corporate-ruled governance gives way to new fascist possibilities, he warns.

Such warnings of intimate futures between capitalism, imperialism, and

fascism are important to take heed of in contexts of Silicon Valley imperialism, a

condition in which Post-Cold War Silicon Valley’s growth is necessitated by its

ongoing penetration into geographically global and intimate spaces alike. In post-

Cold War and now seemingly “postliberal” times, Silicon Valley imperialism

strategically masks the racial dispossession and violence that it inheres under the veil

of liberalism. At the same time, technofascism appropriates liberal and leftist

language in order to galvanize power and space, invoking what Jodi Byrd, Alyosha

Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy describe as “propriation” (2019, 3).

191

By this, they refer to the inextricability of both expropriation and appropriation.

Through propriation, fascist and racist collectives uniquely recycle Cold War enemies

in order to maintain Silicon Valley’s imperiality, locally and globally.

While other chapters in this dissertation specifically study Silicon Valley

imperiality and its recoding of racial and fascist imperatives in formerly socialist

space, here I am more interested in how it functions “at home.” At home, in the midst

of the Bay Area’s ongoing crisis of racial dispossession most recently aggravated by

the current tech boom, or the Tech Boom 2.0, and amplified with Trumpian

technofascism, understandings of liberalism, fascism, socialism, and imperialism

entangle in novel ways. This process in part invokes with what Neda Atanasoski and

Kalinda Vora describe as technoliberalism. Technoliberalism, they suggest, points to

contemporary reinterpretations of liberalism and fascism—twin pillars of US

supremacy (2019, 24). The foundational fantasy of technoliberalism hinges upon

postracial imaginaries, they observe, and can be traced through Cold War and now

post-Cold War trajectories. As socialism emerged in order to combat fascism in

Europe, as the Cold War hinged upon reifying illiberal socialist threat, and as the

post-Cold War common time of Silicon Valley imperialism depends upon the

supremacy of liberalism now suddenly threatened in the dawn of postliberal Trump, it

makes sense that these concepts would be stirred up today. Here I look to how

reinvigorations liberalism and fascism, as well as racism and imperialism, entangle in

the post-Cold War Silicon moment. In particular, I assess how these entanglements

inform the ongoing development of techno-urban space.

This chapter centers upon the postsocialist spatiotemporality of Bay Area

192

gentrification, postracial liberalism, techno-utopics, technofascism, and antifascist

dissent in the post-Cold War Bay Area. Postsocialist temporality here envelops the

Tech 2.0 period, which follows the racial booms and busts of the late-1990s Dot Com

Boom and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. The Cold War and its cessation, I

argue, are key events in understanding the Bay Area’s tech booms. At the same time,

Bay Area Siliconized geography is an apt spatiotemporality from which to theorize

postsocialism. In this way, I read postsocialism as a heterogeneous and global

condition, as well as an analytic entry point for understanding contemporary political

rearrangements, continuities, and discontinuities that inform whiteness and liberalism

in the Bay Area. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery offer, “A central task of

ethnographies of imperialism and neo-colonialism today lies in apprehending the

traces of the past as they emerge, not as hostage to the overarching power of

‘capitalism,’ ‘colonialism,’ or ‘socialism’ qua fixed entities, but as signs of the

tenuous re-workings of twentieth-century capitalist empires and their twenty-first-

century successors” (2009, 30). In reading contemporary Bay Area techno-urban

transformations ethnographically, it becomes clear that regional racial, fascist, and

liberal imaginaries today are not only haunted by, but also co-constitutive of, Cold

War ghosts, posts, and updates.

Racial dispossession in the Bay Area, popularly described as gentrification,

has in large part ushered in by proponents of liberalism (McElroy and Szeto 2018).

Yet new iterations of technofascism in the Tech 2.0 wake of Trump—from alt right

websites and rallies for “free speech,” to fascist ideologies such as neoreaction (NRx)

and the Dark Enlightenment—have shocked leftists and liberals alike. While the rise

193

in racist violence following Trump’s victory is real, here I am interested here in how

liberal imaginaries position growing formations of fascism as equivalent to

McCarthyistic constructions of illiberalism. Put otherwise, within liberal imaginaries,

this moment of heightened fascist organizing in the heart of the techno-imperial free

world collapses the imagined indestructability of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of

history” following the disintegration of state socialism (2006). In the wake of Trump,

Cold War battles for liberalism’s triumph are conjured anew, as has been particularly

evidence by the liberal fears of Russia and Eastern European illiberalism emergent

from liberal media and technocapitalist cyber security firms alike (Lemon 2018). Yet

what is rarely acknowledged is that racial capitalism and fascism, while foundational

to far-right onto-epistemologies and Cold War contexts alike, have dominated Bay

Area landscapes long before the “Trumpocalypse” and the post-Cold War temporality

that shelters it (Chung 2016; Maharawal and McElroy 2017; Ramirez 2017; Self

2003). How can one trace these continuities and discontinuities through the Cold War

and into its various posts? How is gentrification, as a mainstream descriptive of

techno-urban change in the Bay Area inadequate in understanding this uncanny

spatiotemporal conjuncture?

Judith Butler suggests that the “new fascism” of the US marks a novel

technology of liberal and leftist discursive appropriation by the right (2019). Indeed,

from the 1960s free speech movement coopted by the alt-right on the University of

California Berkeley’s campus to the language of antiracist housing justice struggles

now vernacularly appropriated by the Bay Area’s racist pro-luxury development

YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement (funded by tech), there have been distinct

194

cannibalizations of Bay Area liberal and leftist Cold War discourse by proponents of

white supremacy. While these appropriations transpire in parallel with broader Cold

War national trends of absorbing antiracist politics into what Jodi Melamed describes

as racial liberalism (2006), there are distinct cultural and geographic processes that

inform their movements locally. As I argue, this is intimately wrapped in the unique

space that the Bay Area and Silicon Valley have played throughout the Cold War and

its liberal aftermaths.

This chapter proceeds to frame Bay Area technologies of racial dispossession

and resistance through postsocialist analytics, studying Silicon Valley Cold War

techno-urban histories, as well as the impact of postsocialist transition upon the

spatiotemporality of technocapitalist and anti-capitalist futures alike. By way of

beginning, I introduce the landscape of Bay Area Tech Boom 2.0 techno-urban

change, suggesting that postsocialist analytics offer a well-needed antidote to the

myopic lens that gentrification theory often maintains. Then, commencing with the

Cold War, I chronologically traverse through the Dot Com Boom and the

postsocialist present, paying attention to how the cessation of the Cold War impacted

Silicon Valley temporal and spatial reconfigurations. In addition, I study how

technoliberalism is deployed by racial technocapitalism and technofascism,

particularly in the case of YIMBY and alt-right technofascist ideology. How does this

discursive appropriation mask the raciality of technocapitalism and Silicon Valley

imperialism in post-Cold War times? I conclude by theorizing struggles against

Silicon Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism through postsocialist

analytics, looking to spatiotemporal paralysis in the wake of technoliberalism and

195

fascism alike. But first, I begin by theorizing how postsocialism, as an analytic, offers

key insights into the conceptualizing of what is otherwise today described as Bay

Area gentrification.

Gentrifying Postsocialism Studies or Postsocializing Gentrification Studies

I could barely see the punches being thrown in front of me. The backyard of

the East Bay Rats motorcycle club arena was beyond its saturation point with eager

witnesses of the ‘Nihilists vs. Marxists” boxing match slowly unfolding, a

complementary event to the annual East Bay Anarchist Book Fair. Another Saturday

evening in West Oakland, emblazoned with rickety spotlights, tattered ropes, sweat,

black leather, and cigarettes. Some moaned and others cheered as opponents were

knocked to the ground in repetitive blows, indicating the ideological rise or fall of

some semblance of an anti-capitalist future, of some mutation of an older logic

intended to encapsulate and make sense of the contradictions, struggles, and sinkholes

of a landscape entangled in broad strokes of disinvestment, reinvestment,

deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, popularly discoursed today as

“gentrification,” but also bearing other names and analytics (McElroy and Werth

2019; Ramírez 2009). In this section, I ask how postsocialism, as an analytic, might

supplement gentrification studies in order to assess techno-urban transformation in

the midst of Bay Area Silicon Valley imperialism.

It was just months before the boxing match, in late 2013, that an outburst of

actions erupted intended to highlight the violence of Silicon Valley Tech Boom-

induced dispossession. Famously, many in boxing match crowd, but also many

196

others, set to task the blockading of tech buses (colloquially known as “Google

Buses”) in San Francisco and Oakland—private shuttles from multiple tech

corporations viscerally understood as agential in eviction and rental increases

(Maharawal and McElroy 2018). While Silicon Valley impacted San Francisco’s

urban landscape during the Dot Com Boom that followed the collapse of the Cold

War and tech companies shifting from full reliance from the government to more

consumerist-based models, it has been with the new era of the Tech Boom 2.0 that

technocapitalist forces have found ways to penetrate Silicon Valley techno-urban

peripheries in novel ways. While not conflating Bay Area urban centers with each

other (McElroy and Werth 2019), and while not eliding the deeper and uneven

histories of racial disposability upon which contemporary gentrification rests (Roy

2017), it is worth noting that there have been novel shifts in Silicon Valley’s reach

into both cities, with Google buses one of many technologies of infiltration.

Disproportionately, young white men ride these buses, contributing to

contexts of racial dispossession in Silicon Valley’s urban outposts. This spatial

strategy is emblematic of Silicon Valley imperialism and its twin concept of racial

technocapitalism alike. As I question here, why is it towards the post-Cold War Bay

Area—a space that Richard Walker describes as home to a combination of “many of

the largest and richest corporations astride the globe,” some of the leading political

and cultural movements, and “a host of persistent problems, such as wildly gyrating

growth, shamefully unaffordable housing, [and] ghastly homelessness” (2018, 1-2)—

that we must turn our analysis in order to understand the contemporary contours of

white supremacy and its bizarre techno-entanglement with liberalism? Why is this

197

shift in purview especially important in the wake of what scholars of postsocialism

are marking as the renewed “crisis of liberalism” (Dzenovska and Kurtović 2017), or

a post-Cold War moment in which liberalism’s supposed immorality is thrown into

question? And why might both Marxist and neo-Marxist accounts alike of

gentrification fail to illuminate the raciality of the current moment, as well as the

raciality upon which it rests?

Postsocialist analytics allow for new conceptualizations of the Bay Area

present, facilitating a particular unearthing of spatial, racial, and temporal

technologies of dispossession in modes that traditional Marxist and neoliberal

scholarship alike on gentrification rarely does, especially not outside of formerly

state-socialist space. Such a utilization of postsocialist analytics, in the words of

Atanasoski and Vora, must “dehomogenize the ‘socialism’ in postsocialism,’ while

concurrently unmooring ‘(post)socialism from a particular geographic location”

(2018, p. 5). This call aligns with Chari and Verdery’s provocation to consider how

post-Cold War ethnographic practices might help make sense of myriad shifts in race

and empire following the cessation of the Cold War on both sides of the former Iron

Curtain (2009). As Shu-mei Shih argues, the Cold War and its collapse led to a

remapping of the entire world and the formation of the Global North and South from

the prior tripartite cartography, and thus postsocialism, as a condition, needs to be

thought of as a condition affecting the entire globe (2012). Applying postsocialist

analytics in theorizing dispossession and resistance in the Cold War and post-Cold

War Bay Area unmoors techno-urban mutations from increasingly well-rehearsed

gentrification studies debates (c.f. Bernt 2016; Werth and Marienthal 2016), offering

198

supplementary temporal and spatial frameworks.

Ananya Roy suggests that current conversations on gentrification in urban

studies often elide deeper histories of racism and raciality upon which contemporary

transformations rest, or what she describes as racial banishment. As an antidote to this

elision, Roy advocates for practices of “seeing from the South” (2018). This does not

simply mean producing knowledge from or about cities in the South; rather, it means

politicizing urban studies by continuously remaking it from its social and spatial

margins. In this way, “the South is not a location,” but instead “a structural relation of

space, power, and knowledge produced and maintained in the crucible of racial

capitalism on a global scale” (2018). She writes of how, when beginning to critically

engage with the field of urban studies as an undergraduate student at Mills College in

East Oakland, it quickly became clear that the liberal and later neo-Marxist theories

that she encountered in were unable to grasp both her native India, but also the

impoverished Black and Latinx neighborhoods just beyond the campus. “The south

was, I realized, never just Kolkata,” she writes. Instead, “It was all of those places

that the canon of theory could not make sense of except in quite dystopian ways”

(Roy and Bhan 2013). Inspired by her re-spatialization of the South in order to

understand racial banishment in Oakland, here I remap postsocialism in order to

understand techno-imperialism and racial technocapitalism in the Bay Area.

This is aligned with ongoing explorations that I have conducted with Alex

Werth (McElroy and Werth 2019) in order to consider how gentrification theory

deracinates deeper histories of racial disposability in Oakland, as does transposing

San Francisco-based understandings of housing injustice upon terrain from “the other

199

side” of the Bay. While we find postcolonial urban studies to offer important

frameworks for rethinking the spatiality of contemporary Oakland and the palimpsest

of racial capitalism upon which urban change rests (often deracinated by Silicon

Valley descriptives), here I want to consider how postsocialist theory might be useful

in framing the Bay Area and Silicon Valley more broadly. Postsocialism here is not a

geographic descriptive and stand-in for examinations of transformations in formerly

socialist space, just as postcolonial theory is not a substitute for theory emergent in

the formerly colonized Global South. Work emergent from postsocialist urban studies

is of course often confined to Eastern Europe and East Asia, and frequently worries

about the epistemological impasse imposed by transposing Western and even

postcolonial understandings of spatial transformations imposes upon the Global East

(Ouředníček 2016; Shin 2016). But here in decentering the normative cartography of

postsocialism, I want to push these concerns one step further. Why should

postsocialist urban studies be confined to formerly socialist space if postsocialism is a

global temporal event? How has the postsocialist temporal disjuncture in global

history transformed urban space across the planet, from Bucharest to Berkeley?

To read the spatial, racial, and temporal transformations constitutive of (and

constituting) the Tech Boom 2.0 through a postsocialist lens begets focus upon the

material impact of the Cold War and postsocialist transition as they have inhered

Silicon Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism. It was during the Cold War

that Silicon Valley was birthed as a military/educational hybridity designed to

engineer the “free world.” As it attempted to craft the ideal scientific hero of the

pastoral suburbs, it positioned the Valley landscape as antithetical to that of San

200

Francisco and Oakland, the latter home to anti-capitalist dissent, racialized urban

immigration, and grey, industrial density. It was following socialism’s collapse that

the Dot Com Boom began, and that the suburban geography of the Valley techno-

hero shifted towards urban peripheries. It was then that IT began catering towards

consumer use, inciting new forms of labor and liberalism, as well as mobility. The

bleeding of Silicon Valley into postsocialist urbanity cemented conditions of

contemporary tech-driven racialized dispossession. Urban sublation was thus a

laboratory practice for global spatial incorporation, producing what J.A. English-

Lueck (2002) nominates as “silicon places.”

This is not to say that all “silicon places” are even or equal. While there have

been pushes to make West Oakland, a historically Black and working-class

neighborhood the new frontier of Silicon Valley, West Oakland is not nor never will

be Silicon Valley. Neither will it ever be San Francisco, which has been more

enfolded into the Valley during the Dot Com Boom and now the Tech Boom 2.0. To

render flat comparisons and simple metaphors, I argue, deracinates deeper and non-

fungible histories of racial dispossession. This is not to say that Oakland was free

from technological impact during the Cold War and its subsequent tech booms. On

the contrary, it was experimented on by Cold War technologies of curbing dissent,

such as the “anti-poverty” Gray Area program.

Urban studies, and gentrification studies in particular, runs the risk of

rendering flat and ahistorical comparisons in studying cities and urban change, often

divorced from non-fungible histories of race and coloniality (Roy 2017). For too long,

it has also focused so much on space that temporality itself left a footnote.

201

Postsocialist analytics, along with critical races studies and postcolonial studies, can

supplement gentrification studies in generative ways. They help illuminate, for

instance, that Silicon Valley imperialism is only made possible through emergent

postsocialist technologies of time. These proliferate techno-utopic fantasies of

eliminating of both space and time, enabling its real-time global reach.

At the same time, dissent against Silicon Valley imperialism too is of a

particular postsocialist temporality. These protests call for alternative futures, some

past, some yet-to-come, as well as differential frameworks with which to

conceptualize the present. By framing the Nihilist and Marxist boxers sunken into the

drunken, dirty backyard stage through postsocialist analytics points to them being, as

in David Scott’s words, stranded in the present, bereft of future hope amidst a

“melancholic silence” and paralysis, yet also clinging on to something, some futures

past, worth fighting for (2013, 116). Accordingly, we might consider their punches as

responsive to the dominance of neo/liberal horizons routed into what Scott describes

as the postsocialist “ruin of time and the accompanying loss of futures” (2013, 125).

Haunting their punches are “ghosts chained to ghosts” (Derrida 1994, 3) refusing to

be vanquished, dwelling in the spaces of riot, rot, and irreverence. And these two

conditions—that of nihilistic despair and that of being haunted with some semblance

of hope for revolutionary futures past – when compounded upon local and global

theaters of racial technocapitalism, fashion something new. And this, I suggest, has

everything to do with postsocialist temporality.

Silicon Valley and the Cold War

202

Haunting postsocialist temporality in the Bay Area is Cold War Silicon

Valley. Silicon Valley imperialism bears well-established roots in local Cold War

technological infrastructure. In this section, I trace the Valley’s Cold War constitution

and its techno-urban effects, many of which inform Tech 2.0 racial technocapitalism.

Following the Second World War, the US set to task employing scientists and

psychologists to study possibilities of global dissemination of the democratic mind,

merging science and politics to script new notions of a universal humanism. For

instance, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, theorist of human–machine interaction

who coined the term cybernetics, and Columbia professor Lyman Bryson, a champion

of what he described as a “scientific humanism,” argued that democratic nations must

utilize science and technology to construct social spaces in which individuals could

obtain maximum freedom (Turner 2013, 159–160). This would assure global peace

by “containing” Communism. In the words of N. Katherine Hayles, “Deeply

connected to the military, bound to high technology for its very existence and a

virtual icon for capitalism, the cyborg was contaminated to the core, making it

exquisitely appropriate as a provocation” (2006, 159). While cyborgs are not my

focus here, the same assemblage of force that gave birth to the cyborg gave rise to

early Silicon Valley technologies, along with the romanticized techno-human of

whom such modernization both reflected (and to whom it benefited). It is this

assemblage that I focus upon in this section.

Although relationships between the science and military developed during

World War II, it was as the Cold War came into fruition presaged by the 1947

National Security Act, along with the actual US wars in Korea and Vietnam intended

203

to prevent Communist growth, that US science gained increased federal funding and

freedom, strengthening relationships between higher education, military defense, and

scientific research. While the Cold War demanded a strong state to fight the structural

enemy, American political traditions demanded a weak one. To reconcile such

contradictions, universities and scientific industries were effectively empowered as

federal agents, redefined to engineer national and economic security. While East

Coast universities such as MIT could make short lobbying trips to Washington, DC,

geographically distant Stanford University realized that setting up a DC office would

be expeditious, and so they did; Stanford’s own geographic distance incited its

governmental centrality (O’Mara 2015, 27).

During this time, US pro-development urban planners began advocating to

decentralize post-industrial urbanities, denigrating the social unrest accompanying

what planner Tracey Augur pathologized as “near-slum environments” (1948, 312).

In San Francisco, these ideas were intimately linked to the racialization of Filipinx

and Black migration, facilitating “white flight” to suburban spaces like Silicon Valley

while redlining segregated landscapes (Hartman 2002).11 In San Francisco, for

instance, the redevelopment of the predominantly Black neighborhoods of the

Fillmore and Western Addition between the 1940s and 1970s saw thousands of the

city’s Black community become displaced, as the city became a testing ground for

“urban renewal.” This coincided with President Harry Truman’s post-World War II

notion of “slum clearance,” aimed to weaponize racist development. In 1945, the San

Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed, proclaiming, “bluntly, nothing can be done

to improve housing conditions here until a lot of people clear out” (qtd. in Thompson

204

2016). That same year, the California Community Redevelopment Act of 1945 was

implemented as a technology of urban renewal, benefitting developers. Just a couple

of years later, the Planning Commission submitted a proposal to raze and rebuild a

36-block zone in the largely Black neighborhood of the Western Addition. In the end,

over 30,000 people were displaced. A Planning Commission report justified

redevelopment on the basis of public health and “safety.” Officials admitted that

people would be displaced and that many would be unable to afford new rents in the

region, eliding that due to earlier redlining histories, many had already been

precluded from receiving loans that would have enabled them to buy their buildings.

SoMa, Chinatown, and Japantown were also targeted by redevelopment, often

through overly racist language of blight. The redevelopment of the SoMa, according

to the city, required the displacement of 4,000 residents and over 700 small

businesses (Rubin 2002). This was not met without protest. In 1969, local residents

created the Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment, filing lawsuits that

helped delay development. Meanwhile, the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO)

formed in 1968 for similar reasons, refusing to see their neighborhood befall a similar

fate as that of Western Addition. Mayor Alioto had hoped to utilize Lyndon B.

Johnson’s racist “War on Poverty” Model Cities program to raze the neighborhood,

but the MCO successfully pushed back. In this way, urban racial dispossession is

nothing new in Bay Area. Nor are community-driven fights against it. And yet,

redevelopment continued throughout San Francisco elsewhere, spanning the tenures

of five mayors (Hartman 1984, 22).

During this Cold War time, the federal government worried that large urban

205

centers would become easy Soviet targets. Thus, ideas of dispersal became popular,

and led to renewed development in the suburbs. As Brian Chung argues, these

contexts led to the heightened status of the scientist as the ideal suburban resident of

the public imaginary, one welcomed by Stanford (2011). The US Army erected

prefabricated housing for this new ideal resident, crafting new spaces for white

scientific flight to land. Thus, it was both Bay Area racialized geographies and Cold

War spatial imaginaries that impelled millions of dollars to be funneled into military

defense research on sub-urban high-tech firms (Chung 2011, 39). Valorizing this new

Cold War hero, Stanford University built its campus-adjacent research park,

solidifying the “iron triangle,” or the triangular partnership between the Pentagon, top

rank research universities, and defense industries (Adams 1982). Government support

for scientific freedom and the ‘Cold War multiversity’ only bolstered post-Sputnik as

the Eisenhower administration endeavored to not fall behind in the great space race.

Silicon Valley, which after the Gold Rush had emerged as the orchard capital

of California, or “The Valley of Heart’s Delight,” mutated with the settlement of

technology companies. In 1956, inventor William Shockley established the first

semiconductor laboratory in Mountain View, and the next year, Lockheed Missile

and Space moved to Sunnyvale. Shockley, Professor Emeritus in electrical

engineering at Stanford, and Nobel prize winner in physics for his creation of the

transistor, was also a known proponent of scientific racism. A supporter of the idea of

“retrogressive evolution,” he believed Black people to be less intelligent than White

people. A eugenicist, he went as far as to advocate for sterilization of the “genetically

disadvantaged” (Saxon 1989). As I go on to explore later in this chapter, Shockley’s

206

racial technoscientific vision has been reinterpreted in Silicon Valley today.

As Shockley was developing a name for himself at Stanford, companies such

as IBM and FMC, along with other Cold War military defense industries. In 1971, the

Valley of Heart’s Delight was reconstituted as Silicon Valley, referencing the mineral

relied upon by semiconductor companies. Stanford’s first dean of engineering,

Frederick Terman, or the “Father of Silicon Valley,” pushed to transform the research

behemoth into a regional high-tech corporate magnet. For instance, he convinced his

former students William Hewlett and David Parker to start their own company (Leslie

2000; Rosenberg 2002, 15). This saw the emergence of what Nick Dyer-Witheford

describes as “futuristic accumulation,” or “the commodification of publicly created

scientific knowledge, which via copyright and patent, becomes privatized as

intellectual property for the extraction of monopolistic technological rents” (2010,

487–88). Otherwise put, iron triangle formation utilized extractive mechanisms of

technological rent to speculate upon the future.

While the Valley of Hearts Delight relied upon immigrant labor to build

racialized geographies, these became further transformed as silicon chips replaced

prune trees. New high-tech companies heralded an imaginary of a cleaner, lighter,

post-agricultural utopia—racialized, classed, and gendered. Stanford’s Board of

Trustees heralded the emergence of a post-Fordist “light industry of a non-nuisance

type” that would “create a demand for technical employees of a high salary class that

will be in a financial position to live in this area,” or in other words, “a better class of

workers” (qtd. in Findlay 1992, 132). “Anti-factory” pastoral parks and residential

worlds became poised against San Francisco and Oakland and their antiracist

207

social/political movements, such as the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, La

Raza Unida, and the San Francisco State strike of 1968.

During this time, Oakland became the first of six sites tested by the Ford

Foundation’s Grey Areas program. Aimed to disrupt social unrest, the program

discursively replaced “race” with “poverty” to mitigate “juvenile delinquency,” gang

violence, and “human problems in the city” through assimilatory projects of “human

engineering” (Roy, Schrader, and Crane 2015, 294). Domestic pacification, the

program proffered, was a means of what Robert McNamara would later describe to

the World Bank as “defensive modernization” (Ayres 1983). What such grammar

elided was that social unrest was quelling in Oakland not because of juvenile

delinquency, but because white homeowners were anxious about the rise of Black

homeownership.

Also woven into histories of race and racism within the Valley are also those

of Cold War-driven assimilation. For instance, Cold War conditions inspired the

region’s white communities to win the hearts and minds of Cold War Asia. This led

to the sublation of some Asian American collectives into white geographies

differentially than for others (Cavin 2012). During this time, the Cold War suburb

mutated into what Chung describes as a “trans-Pacific hub of Chinese high-tech

business,” in which it is commonly ridiculed that “‘Silicon Valley is built on ICs”—

not integrated circuits but Indian and Chinese engineers” (2011, 4, 45). Of course,

this obviates differential experiences of heterogeneous Asian collectives impacted by

varying racist, colonial, socialist, and national contexts. Nevertheless, it has been

upon a backdrop of Cold War geopolitics that Silicon Valley Asian American

208

subjectivities have differentially crystallized.

Such contexts of Cold War subjectivity helped fuel myths of Silicon Valley

culture as one of meritocracy, multiculturalism, and postraciality towards the end of

the Cold War and into the postsocialist era. As Apple’s former CEO and visionary

Steve Jobs suggested in 1997, racial difference does not matter in Silicon Valley,

“what matters is how smart you are” (qtd. in Reinhardt 1997). In 1997, Business

Week asserted that Silicon Valley was the “immigrant gateway,” or “the quintessence

of the American Dream,” where “any good idea in a garage can turn into a gold

mine” with “no pedigree required” (Reinhardt 1997). Of course, such imaginaries

endured in myth form only throughout the Cold War and its aftermath. When Iron

Curtain disintegration led to job cuts at defense divisions of tech firms, regional press

suggested that with layoffs of white suburbanites, Asian domination “doomed” the

future. Articles titled “No More Mr. White Guy” and “War Surplus Job-Market

Misfits” index such fears, pointing to conditions of postsocialist racialization in the

Valley (Chung 2011, 31). Silicon Valley Cold War-era racial liberalism therefore can

be read as constitutive of, yet distinct from, the era that followed.

Postsocialism Spatiality

With defense cutbacks following 1989, questions arose as to the direction

Silicon Valley would take in the now postsocialist era. When the Internet developed

in 1993, proceeded by the creation of the Web, it became clear that their

commercialization by consumer-based technology companies would impel Silicon

Valley forward. Companies such as Netscape, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, 3Com, and

209

Intel exploded software job growth, leading to the Dot Com Boom (Hughes and

Cosier 2001). This is the era from which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote

their seminal Empire (2000), describing the replacement of local territorial rule with

global flows, decentering and deterritorializing, effacing the tripartite geography of

second and third world divisions. The Web and Silicon Valley were theorized as

intricately part of this new social order, constituting the US’s “soft power,” led by the

internet business sphere—the offspring of Cold War informatics. The internet was

supposed to be, as William Mitchell suggested, “anti-spatial,” comprised of a

“negative geometry” (1996). However, as evidenced in the spatial/racial

infrastructural transformations that accompanied postsocialist technologic growth,

utopian dreams of immateriality themselves dematerialize. During the last quarter of

the 20th century, the Valley’s housing prices rose more rapidly than anywhere else in

the US, totaling a 936% increase (Cavin 2012, 12). Thus, in this section, I study how

post-Cold War Silicon Valley transformed its urban peripheries in novel ways.

The financialization of the technology realm excited real estate developers

upon the Valley’s urban borders as well, inciting what Stephen Graham and Simon

Guy describe as the ‘“dot-com invasion” of IT entrepreneurs and internet industries to

downtown San Francisco,” an invasion clearly classed and racialized (2002, 372). As

Richard Walker chronicled: “Obscure little South Park (near the foot of the Bay

Bridge), once a refuge for a small black residential block, is now a popular eating

spot for the denizens of Virtual valley, the new hot spot for multimedia electronics

and computer magazine publishers” (1995, 39). During this time, evictions grew by

400 percent, and as Nancy Mirabal suggests, displacement was linked to the

210

preservation of whiteness (2009). Graham and Guy further offer, “renewal” was also

gendered: “Ideologically driven and utopian discourses of corporeal, territorial and

urban transcendence, based on the fantasy of perfect IT systems, can thus be

understood as a series of (largely masculinized) “omnipotence fantasies”’ (2002,

369).

Yet, it was pre-1989 that these omnipotence fantasies first coalesced. For

instance, it was during the Cold War that Steve Jobs first visited the Soviet Union,

desirous of breaking through the Iron Curtain. Along these lines, a caption below a

1977 photojournalistic piece on Intel, the world’s largest producer of semiconductor

computer chips, reads, “The Sun Never Sets on Intel,” indexing early Silicon imperial

desire (qtd. in Marez 2013, 87). Yet, these early imperial fantasies proved difficult to

realize until after the Cold War, when cluster-cloning Silicon Valley became viable,12

and increasingly normalized (Rosenberg 2002). Today there are “little” Silicon

Valleys throughout the globe, from India to Romania and beyond. Yet none of these

places, saturated as they are with aspirational desires of recognition, are Silicon

Valley.

Post-Cold War Silicon Valley imperialism has been an era in which

neoliberalism, or what David Scott describes as “smugly confident liberalism,” has

accumulated momentum by “re-territorializing power to roll back what was now

perceived as the ‘moral evil’ of communism” (2013, 4). While early liberal

conceptions of the internet growing out of non-consumer-based networks imagined

the internet as a freedom vehicle to those from repressive regimes, Communist or

otherwise, this imaginary became muddied through Dot Com corporatization. These

211

liberal imaginaries were often Cold War figments themselves, tethered to one

conception of freedom while eliding others. For instance, early Romanian hacking

culture fantasized technological freedom from Silicon Valley imperialism, as I

explore in other chapters of this dissertation.

The Dot Com Boom busted shortly after it began due to overconfident

investment. While the ensuing crash led a decrease in rental and home prices in the

Bay Area, it also impelled the restructuring of surviving companies into more robust

capitalist machines, constituting the emergence of mega-tech companies such as

Apple, Cisco, and Intel. These laid the foundation for the sharing economy and app-

based industries that constitute the Tech Boom 2.0, in which racialized spatial and

temporal IT materializations are haunted by those of the Dot Com Boom era. Today,

heralding the imaginary of clean, light industry, and imbricated in the grammar of

liberal democracy, Silicon Valley corporations now penetrate the former Second

World, often exploiting a technologically inclined labor force and cheaper rental and

production costs. While Silicon Valley corporations promulgate their new forms of

knowledge production and artificial intelligence, often obscured is the outsourcing

that they still rely upon. I have numerous friends working the nightshift for Silicon

Valley company call centers in Romania, for instance, where fantasies of landing jobs

in actual Silicon Valley, along with the economic impacts of disaster capitalism, glue

people to their extractive jobs. Silicon Valley imperialism therefore does not only

penetrate Bay Area urbanities through new technologies of transit, but also former

socialist landscapes. This signals new imperial spatiality endemic to the age of

Silicon Valley imperialism. The phenomenon of producing Silicon space beyond

212

Valley confines is thus one of postsocialist spatiality, mobility, and global liquidity.

This is not simply because prestidigitation has outgrown Silicon Valley space;

postsocialist relations inhere imperial spatiality.

While numerous technology companies themselves have existed in San

Francisco since the Dot Com Boom (and new ones have landing their headquarters in

the City with the Tech 2.0, for instance Uber, Twitter, and Airbnb)—it has only been

during the 2.0 era in which Valley companies have facilitated urban dwelling for

suburban campus workers. Not only have Google buses appropriated public bus

stops, leading to delays in public buses and even elementary school children getting

to school. But also, evictions percolate in proximity to these bus stops. As work by

the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project – a critical cartography, data analysis, and digital

humanities project that I cofounded in 2013 to document dispossession and resistance

struggles in the wake of Tech 2.0—has shown, 69 percent of San Francisco’s

evictions have occurred within four blocks of tech bus stops, as speculators capitalize

on property that can be advertised as adjacent, thereby increasing value (Maharawal

and McElroy 2018). Further, Black populations, along with Black and Latinx

household income levels, have been shrinking in both San Francisco and Oakland,

demographics underrepresented in Silicon Valley technology corporations outside of

service worker positions (Stehlin 2015).

Disproportionately, this workforce composed of young, white men,

colloquially reified as “tech bros.” In 2014, real estate speculator Jennifer Rosdail

mapped this newly venerated human as a “quadster,” or those “under forty [who] like

to hang in the sun with their friends,” and prefer to live in “The Quad” —an emergent

213

real estate geometry covering much of San Francisco’s Mission District. Allegedly,

quadsters “work very hard—mostly in high tech—and make a lot of money” (Rosdail

2014). While the labor performed by this new techno-human is imagined as existing

immaterially, spatial/racial effects materialize. Further, the appropriation of the

Mission neighborhood into the quad, the appropriation of public bus stops into

Google ones, is emblematic of post-Cold War toponymic practices of renaming

space, meanwhile appropriating leftist and liberal language alike.

This toponymical incursion not gone without protest. Denigrating Silicon

Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism alike, there have been numerous

protests against the incursion of quadsters and Google luxury transportation

(Maharawal 2017; Stanley 2018). Some protestors have weaponized vomit upon tech

buses in repugnance, while others offered tales of their past, present, and future

eviction struggles. As one banner outside an early bus blockade read, “Capitalism is

the driver; Gentrification is the Vehicle; Techies on the Bus.” Meanwhile, members

of the anarchist collective Defend the Bay pleaded for “all Bay Area residents to take

action against the tech takeover’s many manifestations: increased rents, exclusive

access to transportation, and the intensified police repression that accompanies

gentrification, which is literally killing Black and brown residents in their own

neighborhoods” (qtd. in Tiku, 2014). Increased police violence has been further

linked to imbrications between technocapitalist companies with military surveillance

partnerships bearing global impact, from Google’s military robotics contract with

Boston Dynamics, to Facebook’s facial recognition software and artificial intelligence

utilized by Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center to suppress illiberal “threat.”

214

While Google does contribute to military robotics designed to kill racialized

collectives of people “elsewhere,” it is also now working to “cure death” for others,

celebrating a transhumanist acceleration into cyborgian immortality. As Google’s

former CEO Eric Schmidt triumphantly proclaimed in 2010, Google’s actual goal is

to engineer the “age of augmented humanity” (Gannes 2010). Facebook, while

developing tools used for racial profiling, now also aims to cure all disease,

emblematic in the rebranding of the public San Francisco General Hospital into “The

Zuckerberg” (McElroy 2019). Thus, in the postsocialist era, racial technocapitalist

and Silicon Valley imperial interests hide beneath the language of liberalism in novel

ways.

For instance, tech conferences such as “Wisdom 2.0” occur around the clock,

often featuring Orientalist panels led by entrepreneurs on how to “become one” with

technocapitalist growth. After interrupting Google’s panel during a 2015 version of

Wisdom 2.0 with a banner that read “Eviction Free San Francisco,” activists, myself

included, were pushed offstage and our banner snatched. Google higher-ups leading

the event then ushered the crowd into a silent meditation in order to assess how they

felt about the tension that they had just witnessed. This meditation elided the tension

that the company imposes on a daily basis, in the realms not only of local racial

dispossession, but also the data colonialism, racial surveillance, and military robotics

(Crampton and Miller 2017; Thatcher, O’Sullivan, and Mahmoudi 2016). This

process, emblematic of technoliberalism, can be understood, per Atanasoski and

Vora, as a “political alibi of present-day racial capitalism that posits humanity as an

aspirational figuration in a relation to technological transformation, obscuring the

215

uneven racial and gendered relations of labor, power, and social relations that

underlie the contemporary conditions of capitalist production” (2019, 4). By

“applifying” liberalism, the most gentrifying of technology companies and processes

in the Bay Area today hide beneath a shiny (and often Orientalist) veneer of techno-

salvifics.

Postsocialist Temporality

The logics of post-Cold War Silicon Valley constitute and are constituted by

accelerated logics of mobility, techno-utopics, and freedom, but also a solidification

of postsocialist temporality. As Silicon Valley itself temporally changed form and

consciousness after 1989, postsocialist temporal analysis is requisite. The Cold War’s

collapse solidified a new global order of time in which, in the words of Susan Buck-

Morss, ‘“we’… may have nothing more nor less in common than sharing this time”

(2002, 68). As Buck-Morss illuminates, while the capitalist project has long been one

in which land has been acquired and exploited as quickly as possible, the socialist one

aspired to accelerate time in contained space per a Marxian evolutionism.

Extrapolating upon this logic, two ratios simultaneously emerge: capitalist

space/time, and socialist time/space.13 With the disintegration of the Cold War came

the imposition of time/space into the triumphalism the of space/time, forging the

figment of a new, in the words of Anita Starosta, “common time” (2014). This

incorporation required translation, or “a process of never-finished synchronization

among multiple temporalities—and by the same token, the process of forging the only

possible authentic ‘we’” (2014, 205). Silicon Valley Time, having abdicated that of

216

Greenwich, was first made possible with Dot Com Boom. Now, in the time of Tech

2.0, it has even more robustly centralized itself, governing the virtual and material

means through which information is absorbed. Returning to time and space ratios, if

postsocialist time/space indeed has been incorporated into capitalist space/time (in

other words, space/time over time/space), all that remains are capitalism squared.

Time has been reduced to nothing, so that accumulation of space and/through

capital can transpire in absolutely no time at all. This new postsocialist Silicon Valley

temporality and its fantasies of immaterial temporality augment under the rubric of

technoliberalism. Technoliberalism disseminates the imaginary that digital

technology can and will remedy the world’s maladies, spread real-time freedom of

information to all, and telescope the “backwards” and “uninformed” parts of the

globe into techno-utopic futurity. For instance, in 2014, a lengthy article in Time

featured a story detailing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new project,

Internet.org, designed to supply even the most ‘remote’ spaces of the planet with

internet. The cover image depicted a tall, white Zuckerberg surrounded by grave-

looking children from the rural town of Chandauli, India. The cover, along with the

project’s mission, was critiqued for its overt coloniality, and as Kentaro Toyama

chastised, “Internet.org is a form of colonialism that whitewashes Facebook’s techno-

imperialism under a cloak of doing good” (2014). As a form and extension of

capitalism, technoliberalism protracts both race and racism into new domains in the

name of future freedom. Reliant upon the racial and the spatial, it disseminates the

imaginary of spatial difference now antiquated and immaterial. Its capitalist logics

celebrate on-demand mobility over private property, so long as mobility is paired

217

with access to capital and space.

For instance, both Eastern European and Bay Area urban landscapes are now

peppered with digital nomads, avatars of Silicon Valley imperialism, as I describe in

Chapter 1. Consequently, the mobility of capital and information, fiber-optically

transmitted in real time, facilitates and is facilitated by the proliferation of highly paid

Valley technology workers into global space. For instance, anytime an Airbnb host or

guest interfaces with Airbnb in any of its 190 operable countries, the startup gains

capital. Yet, Airbnb is one of the leading causes of evictions in both San Francisco

and Oakland, as long-time tenants are displaced to create more profitable short-term

housing. Thus, as technoliberalism superficially dissolves longstanding Lockean

intimacies of freedom with private property and the heteronormative household, it

still relies upon capitalist systems of value, facilitating real displacement. But through

the logics of Tech 2.0, value is rendered abstract in novel ways. Despite fantasies of

omnipotence in which spatial difference disintegrates in real time, space still exists,

unevenly penetrated by postsocialist technologies. And despite the post-1989

absorption of formerly unobtainable spaces into Silicon Valley (from Eastern

European to Bay Area cities), there also remain, in Starosta’s words, “perverse

tongues” that defy the logics of universality in unlikely places, sometimes in

backyard Marxist/Nihilist boxing rings, sometimes elsewhere (2014). These perverse

tongues cry out against the spatial and temporal magnetism of Silicon Valley across

the globe, and against its authorial place in the creation of local cartographies.

Repudiating the authority of postsocialist Silicon Valley Time, their obdurate voices

call for futures other than those being rendered by technoliberalism, while also

218

demanding other analytics with which to theorize the present.

Yet, it is liberalism and the politics of rights that are dominantly galvanized in

the Bay Area as antidote to conditions of gentrification, particularly by non-profit and

reform-based visionaries under the rubric of “housing is a human right.” Upholding

the inclusive genre of the rights deserving human, these formations understand rights

as universally applicable given the collapse of the Iron Curtain. However, as Sylvia

Wynter’s work teaches us, throughout modernity, the mono-humanist universal Man

of humankind has claimed universality while utilizing race to script the elision of the

racialized into the domains of the non-human, or not-quite human (Wynter and

McKittrick 2015). This pattern makes suspect human rights-based calls for universal

application. While the mono-humanist Man attempts to absorb everything possible

into his domain, asserting that those not recognizable as him assimilate, there remain

cultural and political formations outside of his world, offering alternative versions of

humanity, whether this is theorized as Wynter’s “demonic grounds” (1994), the

perversion of tongues, or vomit-splattered tech buses. As Alexander Weheliye

questions, “What different modalities of the human come to light if we not take the

liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has

been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?” (2014, 8).

The rancor of Marxist vs. Nihilist boxing match therefore emerges as one of

countless responses to such a question. On one hand, this match indexes a desire for

futures other than those ascribed by both the invisible hand of global capital doing its

thing and reifications rights-based universalisms. On the other, it calls for differential

epistemologies with which to theorize dispossessions of the present. In the words of

219

Atanasoski and Vora, “The dominance of present-day liberal politics, which collapse

political notions of freedom with the unrestricted spread of free markets, and justice

with liberal rights-based outcomes, beg for an extended exploration of the aftermaths

of the social, political, and cultural disappearance and subsequent reconfiguration of a

socialist political imaginary” (2017, 14). Such explorations, through a postsocialist

theoretical approach, are needed to disinter the spatial/racial/temporal ramifications of

technoliberalism as it subsumes the political. While technoliberalism extends Man’s

domain locally and globally, it also protracts libertarian ontologies that understand

tech corporations as more effective than lethargic government. Accordingly,

technoliberalism seeks to vaccinate against the sluggishness of regulatory liberal

democracy, creating a new system of smart city governance.

For instance, San Francisco’s former mayor Edwin Lee’s election campaign

was bankrolled by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway, one of the primary

investors of numerous tech companies, from Google to Airbnb. It was Lee who

established the Twitter Tax Break Zone in 2011 to encourage tech to relocate from

the Valley to San Francisco tax-free, fomenting heightened eviction rates.

Meanwhile, Conway’s public-private hybrid companies such as sf.citi attempt to

override public decision-making bodies to benefit tech and tech-friendly politicians,

privileging anti-regulatory legislation. This structure invokes what Paul Carr

describes as a “cult of disruption,” or the disruption of non-Silicon Valley space/time

with techno-utopics (2012). As a 2016 signage campaign by the San Francisco

datacenter Digital Reality promulgated in Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains,

“Your Next Stop, West Oakland Station. The New Edge of Silicon Valley: Disrupt

220

Your Industry from our Data Center.” Below its text was a streamline map of the Bay

Area, pointing out West Oakland’s proximity to both San Francisco and the Valley.

In response, stickers manifested upon signs, proclaiming, “Keep Hoods Yours: By

Any Means Necessary,” invoking Cold War-era Panther resistances to racialized

technologies of dispossession. Nevertheless, the datacenter was erected, now visible

from the BART train in West Oakland, appropriatively adorned with its new motto:

“Hella connected.”

The disruptive cult of Silicon Valley has been made famous through events

such as Disrupt SF, in which startups compete for the Disrupt Cup and the $50,000

accompanying cash prize. The 2014 champion of Disrupt SF went to the makers of

Alfred, a sharing economy application that manages other on-demand apps, and

further, comes equipped with a human being—one’s very own Alfred—who delivers

products and laundered clothing, and who even cleans houses, performing duties such

as replenishing paper towel on paper towel holders, all for $99/month. The idea is not

only “to cut into the 30 average hours/week that people spend on household chores,

but to relieve some of the mental strain of dealing with multiple apps and services . . .

coordinating them together” (Crook 2014). Alfred serves as an allegory for the

contradictions between techno-utopic fantasy and racialized/gendered materiality

constitutive of Silicon Valley disruptions. Who becomes an Alfred, conscripted to

exploitative service labor, and who wins $50,000, or has the luxury of enjoying the

surplus labor that Alfred performs? This was what organizers, me included,

questioned in 2014 as we held a protest outside of Alfred’s ceremonious awarding in

San Francisco. But before we could disrupt the event for long, we were shoved out by

221

a private security firm determined that the event was “undisruptable.” In a global

economy in which time remains valuable, yet in which capital circulates timelessly,

some lack the time to perform the drudgery of service labor, or to be disrupted by

protest for that matter. Yet others have no option but to replace paper towel rolls upon

a sharpened backdrop of increased rental prices and income disparity, draped in the

smokescreen of “hella connected.”

“All Housing Matters”

In the post-Cold War Tech 2.0 era, technoliberalism masks the raciality of

capitalism as well as urban planning. Techno-urban development projects,

particularly those supported by YIMBYism (Yes In My Backyard-ism), appropriate

the language of the commons, social good, and even housing justice in order to

expand racial technocapitalism. As I explore here, this exploitation of the social is

endemic to the post-Cold War times of Silicon Valley imperialism, although it rests

upon older Cold War planning histories. In this way, Silicon Valley imperialism

maintains its imperiality both by masking its racial effects with liberalism, while also

by appropriating what once emerged from socialist organizing within the Bay Area.

The primary assertion of YIMBYism is that slow growth reduces available

housing stock, thereby driving up property values. Yet, when it comes to

development, YIMBYism advocates “all housing matters,” and that the

unencumbered neoliberal market will take care of the housing crisis. Creating a

strawman to amplify their luxury development desires, YIMBYs liken their

opposition with racist, wealthy NIMBY (No In My Backyard neighborhood)

222

preservationists—generally white homeowners. As a phenomenon, NIMBYism

emerged during the Cold War in order to preserve pre-Cold War redlined racial

geographies. YIMBY advocates promote a discursive strategy that conflates wealthy

white NIMBY property owners determined to maintain the “traditional character and

culture of their backyards” with housing justice advocates fighting against luxury and

development in poor and working-class neighborhoods. Much like tech companies

have appropriated public space and liberal language to mask their racial impacts, the

YIMBY movement has usurped antiracism to push for their liberal “right” to build

luxury housing. In this way, despite YIMBYism’s framing of housing justice activists

as NIMBY, both YIMBYism and NIMBYism support racist urban planning. What I

want to work through here though is how this appropriation of leftist discourse is a

uniquely post-Cold War imperial technology.

While those weathering racial dispossession in San Francisco know that

building luxury condos does nothing to mitigate lack of available housing (a fact

verified by San Francisco’s General Plan), YIMBYs frame their opposition as

uneducated (Marti 2019; Meronek and Szeto 2017; Redmond 2017). For instance,

during a San Francisco Planning Commission hearing on the deceptively titled

Affordable Housing Density Bonus program, a YIMBY initiative to push for a

citywide up-zoning measure for more market-rate development, YIMBY Policy

Director, Brian Hanlon argued that without development, he would be “complicit in

displacing even more vulnerable populations . . . When I move to East Oakland, I will

most likely be replacing someone who does not look like me.” Hanlon’s ultimatum to

poor communities of color is thus to accept luxury housing construction or else be

223

displaced by this white YIMBY man. This echoes the paternalism of pro-

development forces during the post-Cold War Dot Com Boom.

While tensions between pro-development, anti-development, and slow-

development movements are nothing new to the region, it is not random that the Bay

Area is the birth place of the YIMBY movement. Largely evolving from the smaller

San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF), which was founded in 2014 by

Sonja Trauss, it now encompasses numerous housing groups, holds nationwide

conferences, and has the support of pro-development politicians. From its beginnings,

it has disproportionately enjoyed support from Silicon Valley workers and funders

including Yelp’s CEO, as well as from developers, politicians, and pro-growth urban

thinktanks. Trauss, who pretends to be a housing justice activist, is well-known for

her racism. From writing a blog post in which she wrote that low-income public

housing tenants “usually can’t read or write,” to a 2016 tweet in which she claimed

that gentrification is “the revaluation of black land to its correct price,” her words

repeatedly anger those being dispossessed in the context of techno-urban

transformation. She has also publicly likened herself to Machiavelli in order to justify

capitalist interests. In a Google slideshow that she sent out to BARF members in early

2014, her main objectives were to: “Connect pro-density, pro-building individuals to

each other; Continue to testify in favor of large projects; Disrupt the alliance between

rent-control advocates and affordable housing advocates” (IndyBay 2015). And yet

Trauss frames herself as an anti-eviction activist.

The neoliberal analytics embraced by YIMBY and NIMBY groups alike have

precursors in the Bay Area Cold War and post-Cold War geographies. It was during

224

the white flight of urban centers that the “spatial fix” of the Bay Area suburban

“white noose” concretized (Self 2003; Walker 2004). As Richard Walker and Alex

Schafran suggest, “The Bay Area’s liberal reputation belies the degree to which

blacks lived in segregated neighborhoods, especially during the first wave of postwar

suburbanization” (2015, 24). It was against this racialized spatiality that San

Francisco’s slow-and anti-growth movements emerged. Yet with the Dot Com Boom,

cities too began to be invested in by technocapitalist interests. This led to new

enactments of racialized exurbanization, pushing poor and working-class

communities of color into the suburbs through racialized practices of subprime

lending and foreclosure (Schafran 2013; Wyly et al. 2012). Since the 1980s, of all US

cities, San Francisco has experienced the fastest declining Black population with

neighborhoods such as Western Addition decimated in the name of urban renewal

(Brahinsky 2012).

San Francisco saw large protests against racial technocapitalist planning of the

1990s and 2000s, particularly against the development of lofts and towers. Housing

activists for instance successfully opposed the Planning Department’s decision to

develop Trinity Plaza apartments, which would have led to the eviction of 360 rent-

controlled tenants for the construction of 1,400 market-rate condominiums (Corburn

and Bhatia 2007, 329). As the anti-and slow-growth movements illuminate have

emphasized, while it is one thing to oppose all development, it is quite another to

oppose the development of luxury housing for the rich, particularly when

development induces racial dispossession. And this is precisely where the

NIMBY/YIMBY dialectic falters. Instead of embracing a NIMBY politic, housing

225

justice advocates fighting to curb evictions and the construction of luxury

development organize against racial capitalism. Yet YIMBYs construct a NIMBY

antagonist who equates public and affordable housing with luxury condos. But this

antagonist simply does not exist; it has never existed (McElroy and Szeto 2018).

Beyond reliance on enmity fictions, pro-growth supply and demand formulas

fall short in their ameliorative attempts. Walker suggests that to understand

contemporary drivers of the housing market, rather than buying into the Economics

101 myth that development will solve gentrification, we need to study capitalism and

credit, boom and busts, and elite special preferences (2016). It was, after all,

mortgages and financial institutions and incited the country’s most overheated

mortgage markets during the housing bubble. These have yet to be sufficiently

reformed. For instance, with companies such as Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates,

Pinterest, and Airbnb about to enter public markets and a “coming I.P.O.-palooza” as

of 2019, real estate speculators have predicted that there will be ten thousand new

millionaires within the year (Bowles 2019). Thus, the real estate industry is

recommending that people considering selling their homes wait until this IPO (initial

public offering) transformation, as properties will sell for more. When Google went

public, millionaires erupted throughout the Bay Area, it is estimated that this new

wave will particularly hit San Francisco. Already within the city, where an average

one-bedroom costs $3,690, fifty percent of home sales are going to software

engineers. Unlike the Dot Com Boom, which busted, this boom is showing no sign of

breakdown. In part this is because Tech 2.0 has found a new way to appropriate of the

public, via IPOs, in order to bolster security.

226

IPO publics do nothing to solve the lack of affordable housing in the Bay

Area. Instead, they raze room for YIMBY development. One of YIMBYism’s

primary arguments is that increased development, regardless of the type, will

ameliorate the lack of Bay Area housing, and thus mitigate displacement pressures.

However, building 50 percent affordable housing will only ever keep the ratio of

affordable to unaffordable what it currently is, and this presumes that affordable

housing is not continually lost to evictions—which is not the case. For instance,

between 2016 and 2017, 4,697 units were removed from protected affordable status

due to condo conversion, evictions, buy-outs, and demolitions (San Francisco

Planning Department 2017; Redmond 2017). San Francisco’s own General Plan calls

for 60 percent affordable development to maintain an equitable housing climate, but

on average, the city only builds 21 percent (Redmond 2017). According to the

Planning Department, by the third quarter of 2016, the City had approved 181 percent

of projected market-rate housing for 2022 (San Francisco Planning Department

2017). Yet, the City only rubberstamped 16 percent of its low-income requirements

(San Francisco Planning Department 2016). Even between 2007 and 2014, the City

authorized 109 percent of requisite market-rate housing, yet only met 27 percent of its

low-income requirements (Welch 2017a). In this way, new market-rate construction

creates more of a demand for affordable housing than the market supplies, thereby

worsening the crisis. While YIMBYs maintain that high-density development

produces cheaper rents as more units can be built per acre, as of 2017, the city’s

neighborhoods with the highest rents are also the neighborhoods with the most high-

rise, high-density buildings. Unlike YIMBYism’s “all housing matters” rhetoric, the

227

type of new construction does matter.

As research conducted by the University of California, Berkeley’s Urban

Displacement Project (UDP) has determined when analyzing impacts of market and

subsidized housing developed in the 1990s on displacement during the 2000s, there is

no evidence that market-rate development is effective mitigation (Zuk and Chappel

2016, 3). Further, the project found subsidized housing to be twice as effective as

market-rate development regionally (2016, 10). Proponents of market-rate

development are determined that a process known as filtering leads to older market-

rate buildings becoming affordable as new units are constructed. But as the UDP

shows, while filtering may work in some cases, it takes generations. Filtering, as a

stand-in for “trickle down,” remains in Calvin Welch’s words a “Reagan-era supply-

side fiction” (2017b). Further, Miriam Zuk and Karen Chappel of the UDP offer, “in

many strong-market cities, changes in housing preferences have increased the

desirability of older, architecturally significant property, essentially disrupting the

filtering process” (2016, 3).

Indeed, filtering would only work if areas such as the quad or those

surrounding tech bus stops were not desirable to those with deep pockets. Perhaps this

is why, as investigative research by Darwin BondGraham and Tim Redmond has

revealed, 39 percent of 5,212 condos in 23 buildings primarily built after 2000 have

been purchased by absentee owners (2015). In come condos, absentee ownership is

over 60 percent, with primary residences concentrated in Silicon Valley suburbs such

as Los Altos Hills, Sausalito, and Lafayette. Further, new units were listed on Airbnb

for as much as $6,000 per night, clearly doing little to ameliorate dispossession.

228

Meanwhile, SRO (single residency occupancy units), which throughout the

Cold War housed the region’s most precarious tenants, are now being converted into

tech dorms. Real estate speculators Danny Haber and Alon Gutman, the latter a

Google software developer, have evicted SRO tenants from both San Francisco and

Oakland in order to create cohousing for those in tech. After migrating away from

Airbnb to list now-evicted units, they developed an online “property tech” interface,

OWow, in order to match technologist roommates based upon users’ Facebook

profiles. These spaces, favorites amongst YIMBYs, are exclusionary forms that, like

Airbnb, mobilize the grammar of “sharing” and “community” in order to advance

technocapitalist interest, as explored in Chapter 1. Yet these are just some of many

examples of public space and social good being extracted and transformed by Silicon

Valley imperialism. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has, for instance, mapped

over twenty examples of such occurrences in San Francisco alone, which encompass

playgrounds, streets, parking lots, and even City Hall (2016).

By engaging in a YIMBY verses NIMBY geographic understanding, it is easy

to miss that same logics of racial capitalism constitute each. To think beyond the

fictive NIMBY/YIMBY binary is also to think beyond liberal understandings of

freedom. YIMBYism, as a phenomenon, reminds us that the violence of racial

capitalism has always been obscured under the liberal banners of “progress,”

sometimes coded as “renewal” or “redevelopment.” This language continually fails to

reckon with the racial dispossession required for growth, but also with the deep

history of racial liberalism fueling discursive appropriation. Freeing the market will

never lead to housing for all; racially dispossessive logics will always haunt the

229

present, despite the proliferation of postracial neoliberal imaginaries.

Both NIMBYism and YIMBYism live within the same liberal tradition of

racialized/spatialized appropriation. This technique is unique to post-Cold War times

in that the interests of empire, in this case Silicon Valley imperialism, appropriate the

language of antiracism and housing justice in order to accumulate space. Silicon

Valley imperialism, as a post-Cold War phenomenon, relies upon encroaching into

the space and language of anticapitalism in order to expand. Public space, once an

output of anti-capitalist organizing for the public, has been territorialized in the name

progress. YIMBYism, an epistemology of Silicon Valley techno-urbanism, is abetted

by the absorption of the public, from IPOs to SROs.

Free Speech and the Battle of Berkeley

Racial technocapitalist urban planning in times of post-Cold War Silicon

Valley imperialism has only been aggravated in the Trump era. As Melissa Valle

argues, with the rise of right-wing populisms in the US and beyond pushing agendas

of ethnic and racial cleansing, there is no such thing as race-neutral urban

development and planning (2017). It was because of this that the national Right to the

City movement contextualized the new president as the “Gentrifier In Chief,” a man

who has made no hesitation about pushing a white real estate agenda on the national

platform. After all, the supremacy of white inheritance enabled Trump to grow into

the real estate mogul and luxury golf course owner that he is today (Maharawal and

McElroy 2017; Stein 2019). Not only has he accrued his capital through real estate,

but also, he quickly appointed key positions to people like white supremacist Steve

230

Bannon, anti-public housing doctor Ben Carson, “foreclosure king” of California

Steve Mnunchin, and slumlord Jared Kushner.

It was this desire to accumulate property through whiteness (a foundational

fantasy of US settler colonialism and empire) that also led to an August 2017 far-right

“No to Marxism in America” rally in Berkeley. In response, a counter-march erupted

in San Francisco. Crawling through the city which itself seemed quiet in anticipation

of potential racist violence, demonstrators made clear that racist violence was nothing

new to their cultural and political lives. As the march edged towards the Mission

District, one of its leaders, Ben Bac Sierra, recited a story to protestors of the

whitening of the Mission over the last decade in the wake of the Tech Boom.

Decrying that while city officials are finally censuring the rise of Nazism, many of

these same officials have been largely silent about racialized dispossession and police

violence for years now. Not coincidentally, the march stopped at 16th and Mission

Streets, where a market-rate development project, “The Monster in the Mission” was

slated for construction. This project has been pushed the YIMBY movement and

explicitly racist, anti-homeless coalitions, such as Clean Up the Plaza Coalition. In

this way, YIMBY and fascist-leaning forces have aligned to reproduce racial

technocapitalist spatiality. But these forces also align in their appropriation of liberal

and leftist language, a phenomenon that Judith Butler marks as unique to these times

(2019). This has been particularly evident on the University of California Berkeley’s

campus (UCB), during what became known as the 2017 “Battle of Berkeley” protests.

It is this that I focus upon in this section, attentive to how discursive appropriation

indexes postsocialist temporality.

231

It was during Trump’s campaign trail that new iterations of far-right populism

began to appear across the US, as well as antifascist counter-protests. California was

not immune, from a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim to scuffles outside of the

California Republican Party’s convention in Burlingame in 2016. During this time, a

new fascist youth organization, Identify Evropa, held its first demonstration at UCB.

As the group claimed, their objective was to create a “safe space” for white

nationalism on the campus. The following month, a large anti-Trump demonstration

in San Jose took place, largely led by young South Bay people of color, upon which

far-right activists vowed vengeance. In response, neo-Nazi groups stabbed antifascist

counter-demonstrators in Sacramento, which then led to new moves amongst Bay

Area antiracist and antifascist collectives to join forces in self-defense. The evening

of Trump’s electoral victory, thousands of demonstrators flashed throughout Oakland

in outrage, haunted by fears of what might follow. Molotov cocktails were thrown at

banks, tear gas filled the air, and fires broke out outside the impending Uber office

building downtown—a glaring symbol of Bay Area racial technocapitalism.

In response to growing antifascist organizing, Milo Yiannopoulos, former

senior tech writer at right-wing Breitbart News, began his “Dangerous Faggot Tour.”

As newfound leader of the supposedly more moderate “alt-lite,” yet schooled by

Nazi-sympathizer Steven Bannon at Breitbart, Yiannopoulos followed Identity

Evropa’s lead in targeting liberal university spaces. Although the tour began at the

University of Washington, during which a Trump supporter shot an antifascist activist

in the stomach, the tour arrived at UCB a week later.

UCB first emerged on national cartographies in the 1960s for far-left political

232

activism championing civil rights. In 1964, it birthed the Free Speech Movement

(FSM) and waves of antiracist and anti-Vietnam War civil disobedience in the midst

of the Cold War (DeGroot 1995; Nguyen-Vo and Hong 2018). Concentrated in

Sproul Plaza, the movement conducted teach-ins and demonstrations, some of which

police and the National Guard attacked. Despite these radical roots, as soon as the

FSM became part of official campus geography in 1960s, it was faced with attempts

of pacification and neutralization (Mitchell 1992, 159-161). Yet very few could have

anticipated in 2000 the bizarre ways that the FSM would become appropriated not by

the neoliberal university, but by the far-right.

Yiannopoulos’s speech organized by Berkeley College Republicans and

supported by the Proud Boys—a new “Western Chauvinist” fraternal organization of

the alt-lite—was scheduled for February of 2017. Fear seeped through the air as

reliable sources had gone public that the tech reporter was planning to out numerus

undocumented university students during his speech (Oppenheim 2017). As tensions

rose, counter-demonstrators gathered, soon reaching 3,000 people. But it wasn’t until

a smaller anarchist troupe of 150 people engaged in civil disobedience that the event

was canceled. While these organizers had enacted what the larger group could not,

nevertheless, liberal and fascist media alike denounced the anarchists and defended

Yiannopoulos’s free speech, from UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich (and former

Secretary of Labor under Clinton) to Trump. Even the American Civil Liberty Union

filed a lawsuit on Yiannopoulos’s behalf, much to the benefit of technofascist power.

As authors of CrimethInc contextualized, “From organizing ‘white safe spaces’ to

pretending to represent a new free speech movement, the ascendant fascists

233

understood that the hollow rhetoric of liberalism utilized by hacks like Reich could be

weaponized against anyone opposed to white supremacy and patriarchy”

(Anonymous 2018). In this way, by chiding antifascist direct action, liberals in fact

supported the alt-right. This left antifascists with the burden of countering

technofascism on their own.

This liberal defense of the First Amendment reflects what Lisa Lowe has

accurately described as the economy of “affirmation and forgetting” that accompanies

enfranchisement (2015, 3). When assimilating into whiteness, or from oppression to

freedom from violence, particular forms of forgetting may transpire. But some

differences are unassimilable, leading to what Chandan Reddy describes as “the pre-

mature ‘burial’ of the racialized and undifferentiated deaths,” for instance, those

undocumented (2012, 277). Those who stood in defense of Yiannopoulos’s First

Amendment right may have once been targeted by racism. But having achieved

security and freedom from violence, they seem to have forgotten the political urgency

of fighting violence and assaultive speech. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor observed,

“It is only with the Right that this idea of unchecked free speech arises. . . For

everyone else on campus, speech is regulated, monitored and surveilled. This is core

to the myth of the liberal campus. It does not exist” (quoted in Luu 2018). As much as

free speech has benefited Leftist movements, it has also been used by the Right to

benefit its own, right within the heart of the liberal university.

Following the UCB event, a long series of protests endured throughout the

spring and summer in Berkeley. During these, members of numerous far-right and

fascist groups continually joined forces to take over public space, and antifascist

234

organizers rose to meet them. Largely the fascist groups had never organized in

person together, having only known each other through internet platforms such as

4chan. Many had US Army training, and they were often led by a series of hetero-

masculine men with internet celebrity status. For instance, Kyle Chapman, known as

“Based Stick Man,” became a neo-Nazi hero at the Berkeley protests, forming what

he called the “Fraternal Order of the Alt Knights.” Some of these knights wore pro-

Pinochet shirts and chanted about dropping antifascists from helicopters. Others

brought bagels to fling in anti-Semitic expression. Queers were doxed, and Black-

owned spaces such as the Alchemy Collective Café were vandalized.

At one point, while being assaulted by bagels, a friend turned to me and asked

the fascists could have possibly come from. Some Antifa began yelling at the Nazis

to, “Go back to Europe.” Yet contrary to popular belief, many of these fascists hadn’t

travelled far to attend the protests at all. In a mapping project conducted by the

Southern Poverty Law Center of Hate Groups, of 954 within the US in 2018, 75 are

located in California. Of the 71 groups labeled “racist skinhead” in the US, 11 are

located in California alone (Southern Poverty Law Center 2018). Hate crimes

committed by these groups became more frequent and emboldened in the wake of

Trump’s victory, with 867 cases reported the first ten days of his presidency (Petulla,

Kupperman, and Schneider 2016). The Bay Area was not immune (America’s Voice

2018). Lowe cautions that free speech is part the “modern liberal project,” one that

promises rights, emancipation, and more, but yet which upholds global divisions and

asymmetries (2015, 3). Modern liberalism, stemming from Western European

political philosophy, understands political emancipation as achieved through state

235

citizenship. In the case of first amendment rights, liberalism upholds freedom of

speech for all citizens, including Nazis, but not for non-citizens, such as those who

Yiannopoulos was planning to out. The playing field, while premised upon liberal

notions of equality, is not equal. As Lowe puts it, “In the very claim to define

humanity, as a species or as a condition,” liberal universalism’s “gestures of

definition divide the human and the nonhuman, to classify the normative and

pathologize deviance” (ibid., 5).

In order to fight the violence of liberal universalism, struggles cannot be

premised upon assimilatory aspirations and fictive equalities, but rather upon

antiracist politics that understand the modern racism and liberalism to be co-

constitutive. This is particularly true when considering the paradigmatic sea change in

racial epistemologies and politics that occurred after the Second World War, not

coincidentally during the height of the Free Speech movement and the beginning of

the Cold War when US state racism changed in novel ways. During this time,

anticolonial and antiracist movements gained momentum, highlighting US racial

contradictions, both on US soil but also in Vietnam and other imperial sites. To

manage these contradictions, antiracism became absorbed into US governmentality.

Melamed describes this as racial liberalism, in which, “in contrast to white

supremacy, the liberal race paradigm recognizes racial inequality as a problem, and it

secures a liberal symbolic framework for race reform centered in abstract equality,

market individualism, and inclusive civic nationalism” (2006, 2). Official antiracism

became sutured to US liberal freedom, welcoming some people into the realm of the

human, but not all. Melamed charts that since the 1990s, racial liberalism mutated

236

into the post-Cold War neoliberal multiculturalism, which affixes official antiracism

to state policy while deracializing “racial reference into a series of rhetorical gestures

of ethical right and certainty” (2006, 16). This new racist form recycles the liberal

multicultural hype of the 1980s and 1990s of freedom and diversity—shibboleths for

global capitalism.

Yet neoliberal multiculturalism, while alive and well under Obama, fails to

completely explain how white supremacist capitalism has shifted under the

plutocratic Trump. Both eras rely upon the logics of racial technocapitalism, but

something has shifted. Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed, and Reddy offer, “As dominant

racializing and colonizing procedures shift between Obama-era reformism, upwardly

redistributive neoliberal multiculturalism, and the taking and abuse of land in the

name of austerity, on the one hand, and Trumpist repertoires of criminalization,

renewals of the wages of whiteness, crony capitalism, and white settler ‘blood and

soil’ claims to place and land exploitation” (2019, 4). On the other hand, “the logic of

propriation itself remains naturalized, while the renewal of white supremacy’s

relevance to capitalism reveals the thinness of capitalist civil rights (cum property

rights), thoroughly shaped by and shaping propriation since the 1970s” (ibid., 4). By

propriation, they study the racially dispossessive expropriations and appropriations

that technologies of liberalism, colonialism, and capitalism espouse.

By adding free speech into the domain of propriation, it becomes clear that the

appropriation of free speech functions to embolden white supremacist expropriative

violence. In the fight for their freedom of hate speech, the alt-right fought for the

space of the liberal university and the streets and parks surrounding Berkeley. But

237

also, they have fought to instate the blood and soil genre of racial technocapitalism

and all the dispossession that it inheres. In other words, if capitalism can absorb

everything in its wake in the name of liberal freedom, from SROs to IPOS, it should

be no surprise that fascists can as well. This mode of propriation is of a particular

post-Cold War moment, in which, per Chari and Verdery, “Forms of biopolitical

debris of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism . . . become key sites of struggle”

(2009, 28). This becomes particularly evident when looking towards Bay Area racial

dispossession struggles amidst the ascension of technofascism.

The Dark Enlightenment

Just as both the alt-right and YIMBYism have recycled prior liberal and leftist

forms for their own purposes, post-Cold War temporality has seen US national

tendencies make consistent efforts to recycle the Cold War inimical. It was after 1989

that new hunts for the enemy began to replace the hole left behind by “the Cold War

Communist” and thereby maintain semblance of Cold War identity. In understanding

the contours of this hunt, it is important to think through post-Cold shifts in race and

geopolitics. On one hand, as Chari and Verdery presage, “The Cold War is not yet

over” (2009, 30). How else do we understand the perpetual US “casting about for new

enemies, new sites of danger, to take ‘Communism’s’ place” (ibid., 28). But on the

other, as they also note, in post-Cold War times, colonialism, socialism, and their

various aftermaths employ novels forms of racial technologies to affix life and death

in unique ways. Here I focus upon the construction of the inimical in the heart of

racial technocapitalism.

238

Following Trump’s victory, liberal pundits and media outlets alike were quick

to blame outsiders rather than homegrown white supremacy and the failings of the

Democratic Party. These included poor people, millennials, to the most infamous of

them all—the “dangerous Russians hackers who hijacked American democracy.” In

other words, rather than attending to the longevity of racism that US white inheritance

reproduces (and is constituted by), and rather than acknowledging that increased

neoliberalism within the Democratic Party had in fact repelled leftists from it, the

Party appropriated Cold War grammars to Russophobically scapegoat Russian

hackers. These figments have supplanted the bomb in the longevity of Cold War

nuclear culture (Masco 2011), with Eastern Europe reproduced as the Cold War

illiberal. Yet it has mostly been liberals and not conservatives recycling Cold War

McCarthyism, indexing a strange discursive rearrangement emblematic of post-Cold

War times. Today, as Alexei Yurchak writes, “Western liberalism rejects

‘islamophobia’ but embraces ‘russophobia’” (2017, 3). In this way, liberalism, he

suggests, frames Trump supporters as “a motley cast of Euroskeptics, Islamophobes,

Russophiles, and neo-Nazis” (ibid., 3). Post-Cold War times thus reinvigorates the

“temporarily forgotten, figure of ‘Red under the bed’” (ibid., 10), but crosses the

wires slightly.

Despite this, in March 2018, a news story broke that in part shattered the

geography of liberal-illiberal geopolitics. It was revealed that a British stealth

political technology firm, Cambridge Analytica, had in part rigged the elections,

maybe more so than the elusive antipodal Russian hackers. An undercover

investigation by the UK’s Channel 4 depicted Analytica executives scheming how to

239

effectively inject propaganda into the internet’s bloodstream. As was revealed, the

firm was partly owned by Steve Bannon, and had previously worked on Republican

Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign before Trump’s. Cambridge Analytica alleged possession

of 230 million American voters’ profiles based upon 5,000 detailed data points

largely obtained from Silicon Valley’s Facebook, with Facebook’s consent (Kroll

2018). Of course, much of this data is available to anyone through processes of what

Jim Thatcher, David O’Sullivan, and Dillon Mahmoudi refer to as “data colonialism

through accumulation” (2016). Promises of “‘big data’ within the utopian imaginaries

of digital frontierism” inhere new forms of unfettered racial technocapitalism (2016,

990). Yet Cambridge developed unique micro-targeting techniques to pair consumer

information with psychological data extracted from social-media platforms. This was

used by the Trump campaign to target people with custom images, messages, ads,

mailers, and even in-person interactions – a recipe that the company’s CEO,

Alexander Nix, called the “secret sauce” (quoted in Kroll 2018). Chris Wylie, who

helped start the company, described how they the company was built to harvest

millions of people’s Facebook profiles “and built models to exploit what we knew

about them and target their inner demons” (ibid.) In 1992, Nigel Oakes, who crafted

the psychological laboratory that would eventually grow into Cambridge Analtyica,

explained, “We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler” (ibid).

While Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook’s data through new methods,

it has been Facebook that has extracted data on its 1.65 billion users, comprising the

largest biometric database in the world (Dishaw 2015). This database is used by local

police officers upon their discretion (Coleman 2016), particularly to track protestors

240

and threats to democracy. As has been uncovered, of 63 police departments

interrogated in California, 20, including those in Oakland and San Jose, have acquired

social media surveillance software (Wong 2016). Thus, when any of Facebook’s

users upload and tag a photograph, users assist its facial recognition algorithm and its

DeepFace monitoring program, as well as local police departments (Rosenblatt 2016).

As of 2016, the company has estimated that it can accurately identify a tagged person

98 percent of the time, better than the FBI’s own Generation Identification software,

which only boasts a 50 to 85 percent accuracy rating (LaChance 2016).

While big databases such as Facebook’s ignite techno-utopic fantasies for

some, facial recognition “datafies” the human into profitable parts, dissecting,

extracting, quantifying, and selling others’ digital selves. These violent mechanisms

of data participate in modes of what Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller define as

“algorithmic governance” (2017). This refers to “the manifold ways that algorithms

and code/space enable practices of governance that ascribes risk, suspicion and

positive value in geographic contexts.” Algorithmic practices, derived from

psychological data-mining to biometric surveillance, often replace human decision-

making processes with machine-based learning, pretending to be objective through

their techniques of distancing. And yet, these technologies have been constituted

through human-made fantasies and prejudices, coded and spatialized to produce

desired results, protocols, predictions, and borders. Further, they have been designed

by humans deeply enmeshed with older racist onto-epistemologies, from settler

colonialism to Cold War Silicon Valley informatics.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted broke while I was in Bucharest.

241

While many people there didn’t seem to notice, others heaved sighs of relief, hoping

that finally the US might stop stoking Cold War flames and instead look at its own

Silicon underbelly where technofascism is alive and well. For instance, Peter Thiel,

Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder, became part of Trump’s transition team

shortly after his election, and Uber’s former CEO, Travis Kalanick, entered but then

shortly exited Trump’s advisory council, inciting protesters to barricade Uber’s San

Francisco headquarters amidst January inauguration protests. During Trump’s

inauguration, the DeploraBall (attended by far-right activists and Thiel) was

organized by software investor and former Stanford Review editor, Jeff Giesea, who

also once worked for Thiel Capital Management. As was later revealed, Giesea had

partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X in 2016 to wage

meme warfare for Trump. Together, they worked with former BuzzFeed employee

Anthime Gionet, “Baked Alaska,” and the right-wing troll Jack Posobiec,

disseminating Breitbart memes (Harkinson 2017).

Thiel, Giesea and other technocapitalists are responsible for coding a

technofascist ideology and onto-epistemology that some call the Dark Enlightenment.

Inspired by the philosopher and science fiction writer, Nick Land, the Dark

Enlightenment and its subsects of neo-reactionary (NRx) and right-accelerationist

philosophies, “leads us to the fever swamp of alt-right culture wars and the anti-

democratic urban imaginaries of billionaire libertarian investors in technology in the

USA” (Burrows 2018, 1-2). One of NRx’s primary concepts is that democracy does

not work, and that nations should be fragmented and broken into tiny CEO-ruled

states. It promotes gated off-world communities, as well as eugenicist hyperracism,

242

not so different from Silicon Valley’s William Shockley’s “retrogressive evolution”

of years past. NRx also espouses the aesthetic vision Post-Anathema, based upon a

technofuturist, hyper-masculine visual culture saturated with soldiers, guns,

cathedrals, tanks, spaceships, smart cities, and Greek gods (Gray 2017).

Land’s “philosophy-fiction” long-form text, The Dark Enlightenment, was

written in 2012, and is regarded as the NRx bible (MacDougald 2015). It features the

work of a Bay Area blogger, Curtis Yarvin, founder NRx (Haider 2017). Funded by

Thiel and an inspiration to Bannon, Yarvin writes on race and history, and has gone

from questioning, “What’s so bad about the Nazis?,” to aligning himself with the

Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s defense of slavery (Burrows 2018, 10; Gray

2017). Yarvin also believes that the Soviet Union in fact won the Cold War because

the US is now “a communist country” (2016). Extrapolating upon Yarvin’s entwining

of libertarianism and Victorian Social Darwinism, Land embraces the work of Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari, opening NRx up to many who might not otherwise

engage in technofascism.

NRx enthusiasts also point to the 1991 Dot Com Boom technolibertarian

manifesto, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse

of the Welfare State, as a source of inspiration. Thiel cites this text as his greatest

textual inspiration, as do Silicon Valley figures such as Netscape founder and venture

capitalist Marc Andreessen, as well as entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, known for

pushing for Silicon Valley’s US secession (O’Connell 2018). The 400-page book

portrays a post-democratic future analogous to the medieval collapse of feudal power.

The book eerily predicts certain strains of the Tech Boom 2.0’s landscape, for

243

instance the rise of the internet, the birth of cryptocurrencies, and the emergence of a

new class of “cognitive elite” more powerful than nation-states. These allegedly will

triumph in the wreckage of democracy’s collapse.

In preparation for the wreckage, in 2011, Thiel purchased 477 acres of land in

New Zealand. In 2016, the famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman

announced that “he had an arrangement with Thiel to retreat together on a private jet

together to New Zealand in the eventuality “of some kind of systemic collapse

scenario–synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-

armed states,” and so forth (O’Conner 2018). The following year, a scandal broke out

when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg purchased 700,000 acres in Kauai, Hawaii,

potentially displacing Native Hawaiians of their Indigenous claim to that same land.

And then in 2018, a group of blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs bought an

“eternal boy playground” in Puerto Rico, their own private crypto utopia playground

upon the deadly and life shattering wreckage of the 2017 Hurricane Maria. These

technofascist utopias index the settler colonial and Silicon Valley imperial logics that

shelter the techno present and future. And, as they suggest, the differences between

speculative fiction and the present have always been fictive.

NRx has been widely supported by the alt-right, notably having been featured

in a Breitbart article in which Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari identified NRx as the

intellectual vanguard of the movement (2016). As they observed, NRx appeared quite

accidentally at first, on a debate on LessWrong.com, a site dedicated to the

“advancement of rationality” overseen by Eliezer Yudkowsky. For years,

Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, worked

244

alongside Michael Anissimov, a strong believer in Ray Kurzweil’s concept of

singularity (the merging of AI and humans through biotechnology) and

accelerationism (the speeding up of computer technology and capitalism in order to

automate singularity). Anissimov is also an avid reader of Julius Evola, the Italian

fascist philosopher also found on Bannon’s bookshelf (Beckett 2017). Many also cite

Nicholas Wade’s bestseller A Troublesome Inheritance, which makes the case that IQ

differentials are based upon race.

LessWrong and Anissimov’s now defunct MoreRight sit amongst a

constellation of sites, from the alt-right 4chan to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer.

Together, they have been used by the alt-right in organizing. These sites are, as

Angela Nagle writes, the product of the “creative energy” of the alt-right, in which

“amoral libertine Internet culture” congeals with white, male resentment (2017)—an

affect and demographic not uncommon in Silicon Valley. And notably, the Daily

Stormer, while existent, enjoyed the largest percentage of its traffic from Silicon

Valley. This group maintain heroes like Yiannopoulos, along with the neo-Nazi

hacker Andrew Auernheimer, or “Weev,” a tech support worker for Daily Stormer

and The Right Stuff. They also love the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf

Kjellberg, who maintains a “Pewdiepie” YouTube channel with 54 million

subscribers, featuring Nazi-themed jokes. In an investigative piece on alt-techies,

Josh Harkinson (2017) found that many are quick to explain the dominance of

white men in the tech industry (main actors in Bay Area gentrification) through

overtly biological racism and sexism. As computer chip designer in Berkeley who

goes by the screenname of “White Morpheus” on the Daily Stormer writes, The

245

history of nearly every field of science and engineering was driven by white

Europeans . . . Nobody will say their real feelings [about the alt-right] because a mob

of fat blue-hair complainers will drive you away from your career forever. Peter Thiel

coming out [for Trump] was a joy to us all, because he could show his support for the

Trump train where we could not (qtd. in Harkinson 2017). White Morpheus chastises

South Asian immigrants working on H-IB visas in Silicon Valley, as do many of his

peers. As Roger Burrows cautions, “In a world where Silicon Valley (white male)

billionaires attracted to the ideologies of Ayn Rand curate the rise of the alt-right, the

new populism, and the mainstreaming of, inter alia, misogynist, racist and fascist

discourses, those interested in urban futures” should take the rise of NRx seriously

(2018, 13).

Bay Area techno-urbanism, supported by technofascist visions, does make it

appear that the NRx future has already arrived. “Whatever the analytic

worth(lessness) of NRx philosophy,” Burrows suggests, “it is important to recognise

its ideological function and the powerful actors supporting its propagation; not least

those investing in myriad technologies in Silicon Valley who have seemingly been

convinced by Land’s idea of hyperstition – the creation of fictional entities that can

make themselves real” (2018, 4). Similarly, Shuja Haider, in an expose on the Dark

Enlightenment, ventures, “If the builders of technology are transmitting their values

into machinery this makes the culture of Silicon Valley a matter of more widespread

consequence” (2017). In other words, in NRx is already being written into urban

technologies and smart cities, not to mention practices of data colonialism and

algorithmic governance, we cannot simply ignore it. Hyperstition, it turns out, may be

246

nonfiction that theorizes fiction becoming realty.

While the cessation of the Cold War arguably led to the birth of the Dot Com

Boom and the consumer-oriented liberalism of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and more.

California ideology of the 1990s was characterized by a dialectic of New Left

utopianism and Ayn Randian individualism (Barbrook and Cameron 1996). But this

has given way to a new California ideology, a technological authoritarianism marked

by figures like Thiel and Elon Musk. As Haider observes, “If Ronald Reagan and

Margaret Thatcher had served up an all-you-can-eat shit buffet in the 1980s,

promoting the free market at the expense of the majority of their citizens, [Land]

responded by taking laissez-faire economics to a perverse extreme” (2017). Racial

technocapitalism has become the protagonist history, with humans simply cogs in the

machine. As he elaborates, “Forget time-traveling killer robots or ancient beasts. NRx

has simply exposed the operations of the capitalist machine in the present.

Mainstream apologists for neoliberalism have a decision to make: whether to embrace

the pseudo-science of Silicon Valley hyperracism, or to reject the vast economic

inequalities generated by market society” (2017).

Technofascism is nothing new in the Bay Area. It has long been constitutive

of Silicon Valley technoscapes, from the dawn of the Cold War to its contemporary

post-. The rise of the alt-tech exposes this longevity. Yet technofascism, as Haider

notes, defended by neoliberal economics and liberal politics. As liberalism enters a

period of crisis, saturated by apocalyptic visions and the potential collapse of “the

free world,” rather than supporting antifascist organizers, its proponents often defend

the tradition of free speech—one now appropriated by the coders of fascist futures.

247

Meanwhile, there are designers of luxury urban futures espousing the identity of

“housing justice.” Yet, these YIMBYs might be more aligned with those modeling

off-world techno-utopias in outer space (or Puerto Rico for that matter) than those

fighting for shelter on earth. Postsocialism, as an analytic, is a helpful tool in

theorizing these continuities, discontinuities, and propriations. But postsocialist

theory is also useful in analyzing resistance. How else can we make sense of

emergent Bay Area news articles entitled “Anti-homeless robot covered in barbecue

sauce, given well-deserved ass-kicking” (Worgaftik 2017)?

Nihilisms

Protests enacted outside of the Alfred Disrupt Cup, Google buses, and anti-

homeless robots (that do indeed exist) are frequently critiqued as neo-Luddite, “anti-

tech,” and out-of-joint. However, such disapprobation assumes that postsocialist

racial technocapitalism and fascism alike are both the unavoidable future, and that

they are entirely new. Not only are Silicon Valley disruptions dependent upon Cold

War spatial/racial/temporal logics and their postsocialist turn, but beyond that, they

hinge upon capitalism, itself an older technology predicated upon reducing every

“thing” into the spectral abstraction known as money, dissolving diverse ontologies

into value form. As was once written in the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid

melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1967, 3). It would thus be an unjust assertion that

anti-tech demonstrations have been simply directed towards the novelty of new

technologies abdicating older ones, for instance, in the case of Alfred, servitude.

Rather, protests pivot against a moment in which all that is assumed to be air, to be

248

immaterial, calcifies into solidity, into the shrapnel and debris left in the wake of a

new iteration of racial techno capitalism on steroids, or technofascism. Weaponized

vomit and boxing ring punches can instead be read as perverse tongues calling for

something other than the presumed common time of post-Cold War Silicon Valley

imperialism, yet they are paralyzed by the gravity of its dispossessive weight. These

tongues critique racialized forms of eviction, surveil-lance, and consciousness that

have newly drawn Silicon Valley into urban and global space.

This contradictory despair and hope, mired within the sinkholes of the leading

global industry, can be understood as both reflective and productive of a postsocialist

condition. Silicon Valley renegotiations of space are only made possible through

post-Cold War circuits of capital, knowledge, and fantasy. Silicon Valley globality

can be theorized as a world-historical conjuncture which, in Gary Wilder’s words,

produces a “politicotemporal paralysis” whereby imaginaries of freedom have been

collapsed with those of markets, diffused across a global space in which alternatives

to liberal capitalist democracy appear foreclosed (2015, 196). And this collapse has

been abetted by the very technologies that it creates. In this way, postsocialism, as an

analytic, is useful in indexing not only epistemologies surrounding the phenomenon

today discoursed as Tech Boom-induced gentrification and its global condition, but

also, of the social worlds emerging to combat it. For it is those social worlds, those

bodies ensconced within boxing rings, bruised in supernova, perhaps bloody, perhaps

not, that the hegemony of Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated telos of liberal progress

falls short, becoming “only gospel” (Derrida 1994, 56). Postsocialist analytics help

explain this strange spatiotemporal conjuncture in ways that gentrification does not.

249

Throughout the summer of 2014, the San Francisco Mime Troupe toured the

Bay Area region with its satirical musical comedy, “Ripple Effect,” written by

Eugenie Chan, Tanya Shaffer, and Michael Gene Sullivan. The performance stewed

with familiar tensions upon the Bay Area tech-driven gentrifying landscape,

allegorizing a world in which revolutionary potential is swallowed by Silicon Valley

surveillance infrastructures, inciting economies of gentrification and loss. But during

its enactment, something else transpired too. Much of the Mime Troupe’s

performance takes place aboard a small vessel called the Distant Horizon, traversing

the waters surrounding San Francisco. The captain/tour guide, Deborah, played by

Velina Brown, enacts recursive paranoia, illuminating that she does not trust anything

invented before 1988, the year before the end of the Cold War that, she makes clear,

also witnessed the birth of both Prozac and cell phones. Onboard her ship sits two

passengers. Jeanine (Lisa Hori-Garcia) is an app developer from Nebraska working

for a tech giant, Octopus. Anxious and over-stimulated, Jeanine explains that she has

trouble focusing when beyond the confines of her office cubicle. And then there is

Sunny (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro), a Vietnamese immigrant and defender of the

American dream, yet simultaneously traumatized by the US invasion of Vietnam,

now overprotectively raising her daughter and running a beauty salon in the

predominantly Black neighborhood Bayview. As it turns out, Sunny is monitoring her

daughter with a surveillance app invented by the uneasy Jeanine, who had originally

conceived of the technology to oversee her disabled grandmother who was prone to

wandering. Further, Sunny is facing eviction because Jeanine’s company is acquiring

new office space in the gentrifying neighborhood. But the plot does not end here.

250

As the story unfolds, we learn that the distrustful captain Deborah had been an

active member of the Black Panther Party, and that since the 1960s, she has been

searching for a lost partner disappeared by COINTELPRO operations. Seamlessly, it

unravels that her partner was not actually disappeared, but instead went underground,

only to reemerge as the CEO of Octopus, Jeanine’s boss, now a staunch defender of

capitalism. The play reaches its apex as the women realize that the only way to

dismantle the Octopus and its various tentacles surveilling all intimate space while

controlling information flows, is for all three women to collaborate, dismantling

Octopus’s technology through a backdoor that Jeanine had coded into the surveillance

app. At first Jeanine is reticent, complaining to the adamant Deborah that she is not

political, and that she does not know how to fight the new technocratic empire. To

this, Deborah dramatically retorts, “There is no such thing as not political!” much to

the crowd’s delight. In other moments, Deborah undoes Sunny’s identification as

being middle-class, vehemently shouting, “There is no middle-class; there is only the

working-class!”, and the rich. As Sullivan later explained, the performance

intentionally hinted that the conjoining of different working classes is integral to fight

a common enemy: that of the gentrifying tech giant empire (qtd. in Schiffman 2014).

The performance concluded with the women acknowledging that together, though

direct street action, they can keep Sunny and her daughter housed.

Months before the performance, I was asked by the Mime Troupe to

participate in their 2014 debut in Dolores Park in San Francisco by rallying the

audience after the protest. Just a block away from the performance was the site of a

seven-unit household fighting an eviction notice issued by Google’s then head of e-

251

Security. The Mime Troupe had envisioned that following the uplifting performance

and rallying cry, that audience members would be inspired to join tenants and march

to their home in an act of solidarity. But following the performance, upon the park

sprinkled with artisanal picnics, few people joined our picket as we crawled up

Dolores Street.

While larger and more successful anti-eviction protests have occurred since

then, the inability to rally even a dozen people in a crowd over 500 seemed indicative

of postsocialist despair. Is the Distant Horizon approaching a new working-class

collectivity in which the defeat of the high-tech empire and its global penetrations is

possible? Or, does it harken to something else, some other horizon haunted by, to

conjure Scott’s work, “a wound that will not heal,” a wound that takes over,

disrupting the linearity of historical time (2014, 13)? A wound scarred upon global

imaginaries following the supposed evacuation of socialist alterity. A wound that

suggests, by the anonymous author of the anarchist text Desert, “the world will not be

‘saved”’ (2011, 6). If not more than a dozen people would take fifteen minutes to

walk up the street to help a neighbor fight an eviction being implemented by a Google

employee, and if liberals censure antifascists for disrupting technofascist free speech

acts, then what future might endure outside of the post-Cold War rearrangement of

liberalism, fascism, and anti-capitalist alterity?

In the wake of technofascism and its racially dispossessive propriations, it

seems imperative to break from post-Cold War time in order to configure

“unappropriable” futures. After all, the revolutionary time of protest, of romance, is

of the same making as global capitalism—ideologies of universality conscripted

252

through Marxist-Hegelian timelines of global overcoming. Fighting a universal, that

of postsocialist Silicon Valley imperialism and its attendant forms of racial/spatial

dispossession, will only result in failure if another universal is applied to dismantle it,

leading to recurrent catastrophes and paralysis. In the case of such universal

application, perhaps failure, following the work of Jack Halberstam, is revolutionary.

To disrupt racial technocapitalism and its propriations, we do not need one perversion

of tongue to triumph; neither the Nihilists nor Marxists need emerge victorious. To

disrupt the disruption, it would take the endurance of multiple and incongruous

perversions, visceralities, and failures. It would take revolutionary imaginaries

uncoded through liberal teleologies, unbound by the common time of Silicon Valley

imperialism, yet irrevocably tethered to a postsocialist condition. As such, it seems

that postsocialism is one of many necessary analytics needed to theorize the present,

the past, and the heterogeneity of futures both already here, and yet-to-come.

253

Chapter 5: Hacking the Inimical of Post-Cold War Time: Mr. Robot, the Dark Army, and the Doomsday Machine

This chapter continues to theorize postsocialism as an analytic to make sense

of growing entanglements between Silicon Valley imperialism, racial

technocapitalism, and fascism. By reading Sam Esmail’s American television series,

Mr. Robot, and by ethnographically engaging in hacking practices in Romania, my

mapping of the US and Romania as postsocialist continues. During the first season of

Mr. Robot, the anti-capitalist hacking collective, F Society, succeeds in taking down

the world’s largest megacorporation, E Corp. Nominated as Evil Corp and resembling

a hybridity of Enron, Bank of America, and Google, the conglomerate owns 70

percent of the global consumer credit industry, stored in its database. After a season

of scheming, F Society initiates what’s called in hacking as a DDoS attack, inciting a

financial revolution and an era subsequently referred to as post-5/9, collectively

referencing date of the hack, the 2008 financial collapse, and the post-9/11 era.

To celebrate the hack’s success, F Society holds what they describe as an

“End of the World” party, advertised by posters mirroring the original theatrical bill

of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and

Learned to Love the Bomb. Kubrick’s Cold War film, a satire on American and Soviet

politics in the nuclear age, culminates in the detonation of the Doomsday Machine, a

mechanism that once set in place destroys all of humankind despite government

attempts to thwart it. Mimicking the red, black, and white color schema and

composition of the original poster, F Society hacks the original text, replacing it with,

“No Bomb, Just the End of the World.” For the hacktivists, a celebration of what is

254

known in computing as “zero day,” or the exploitation of a computer software

vulnerability that upon detonation is unstoppable (doomsday), is both haunted and

constituted by Cold War ghosts.

Today, the world is as divided as it was throughout the Cold War, but the

divisions are differently striated, the “dystoptics” newly arranged. While the

composition of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove poster detailed a Soviet hammer and sickle

on one side, and the US flag on the other, F Society’s party announcement displaces

Soviet imagery with E Corp’s logo, as for them it is corporations rather than

governments that need to be destroyed. And conversely, for contemporary

technocapitalism and the US imperialism that enables it, or techno-imperialism, anti-

corporate hacktavists pose bomb-like threat. From the F Society to Anonymous (the

latter a model for the former, also famous for their DDoS attacks), to hackers such as

Guccifer and Guccifer 2.0 (known for having hacked Democratic Party emails, now

pathologized by liberal media and pundits as “dangerous Romanians” and “Russian

bears”), cybersecurity threats have reached the level of the bomb in US security

discourse. As Joseph Masco observes, this landscape remains mired in “Cold War

nuclear culture” tethered to “deep structural investment in the atomic bomb” (2014,

18), framed upon a “utopian-apocalyptic circuit” (2016, 312). Reflecting upon these

troubling times, Karen Barad offers, “With fascism on the rise around the globe and

the threat of an accelerated nuclear arms race at hand, tied to a perverse sense of the

usability of nuclear weapons, the false security of global strategic deterrence based on

MAD (the military doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction) left exposed and

undone by madness, compulsiveness, and hubris, the 20th century is anything but

255

past/passed” (2017, 57). Aligned with her call to consider the entanglement of 20th-

century temporal forms with those of today, here I specifically focus upon hacking

culture. Entanglement calls into question presumed geometric understandings of scale

and topology, and instead foregrounds connectivity and boundary as more

analytically salient (Barad 2007).

While assessing Cold War ghosts entangled in Western interpretations of

Eastern illiberal technoculture, here I also read hacking imaginaries from the other

side the updated Iron Curtain. There, hacking culture remains embedded in a different

circuit, one nevertheless entangled with the West. Developed through an

accumulation of socialist informatics histories and technoscience, it is also informed

by the impacts of the disaster capitalism let loose in the aftermath of 1989. Romania,

once a center of socialist-era computing, is today a hotbed of hacking, malware

development, fast internet, and attempts to scam techno-imperialism. While defiant to

the West, it also becomes absorbed into Cold War 2.0 geopolitical imaginaries, the

latter determined to maintain the “common time” of liberal democracy against all

technological threats. Just as Eastern Europe technoculture becomes recoded as

inimical in the Cold War 2.0, so does anti-capitalist cyber deviance within the borders

of the West, updating McCarthyistic hysteria. In this way, groups such as F Society,

based in the West, are still read as the Cold War 2.0 enemy in liberal imaginaries. By

conflating the enemy as anti-democratic, illiberal, authoritarian, and even fascist,

liberal politics here script anti-capitalist technologies within the West as threats to

global liberal democracy. In this way, liberal politics are ill equipped to map actual

fascism and its postsocialist resurgence.

256

To understand this inimical entanglement, it helpful to engage what Ovidiu

Ţichindeleanu describes as a decolonial approach to postsocialism (2010), attentive to

the homogenizing subject effects of the Western Cold War dystoptics as they render

both state socialism and anti-capitalist projects of the present as an illiberal

aberration. Hacking culture (at least the kind unrecognizable in now normalized

technocapitalist “hackathons”) becomes coded as backwards in this process, with

liberal grammars interpreting it against the interests of Western liberal democracy

(Coleman 2013). In this process, an array of cybercultural forms from diverse locales

become conflated as the technological enemy. This sloppy politic elides the violence

that liberal techno-imperialism produces, much of which is racial and reliant upon

racial technocapitalism. It also obscures the ways in which Western imperialism and

technologies embolden new connections between technocapitalism and fascism, or

technofascism. In this way, liberalism, by pointing its finger to the illiberal Cold War

2.0 enemy, enables racial and at times fascistic violence to grow in novel ways.

Postsocialist analytics are helpful in understanding this mechanism, particular

when freed from their oft assumed geographic, epistemological, and temporal

boundaries. As Neda Atanasoski argues, postsocialism itself can be read as “a global

condition that produces a social, economic and cultural ethic that builds on and

disavows previous racial and imperial formations” (2013, 23). Also helpful in

assessing techno inimical forms in postsocialist times is Sharad Chari and Katherine

Verdery’s provocation to produce post-Cold War ethnographies that connect past and

present imperial forms (2009). Post-Cold War ethnographic methods foreground

imperial connections and discontinuities before and after socialism, especially when it

257

comes to racial technologies. For instance, and as I explore here, Western techno-

imperiality was alive and well on both sides of the former Iron Curtain before

socialism, engineering the attempted annihilation of Roma and Jews. What does it

mean that it has been updated today? What does this update do to understandings of

race, technology, and the future?

In this chapter, I focus upon postsocialist temporality, postsocialist

technoculture, and the crisis of liberalism, particularly as the latter reinterprets racial,

fascist, and imperial configurations. Reading hacking imaginaries from both sides of

the Iron Curtain 2.0, I question how understandings of enemy and temporality have

become, and continue to be, hacked anew. By this, I ask if hacking the inimical

within the utopian-apocalyptic circuit board can do anything but reinterpret an older

inimical form, and if instead, hacking time might offer a way out of the post-Cold

War tendency to reproduce the enemy. In what follows, I supplement ethnographic

work conducted in Romania with readings of fiction and politics, particularly as the

lines between them continue to blur. As David Scott suggests, fiction offers insight

into different modes of and relationships to time, be out-of-joint or apocalyptic,

successive cyclical, orienting us towards conjunctures of temporal crises (2013, 68).

By bringing together fiction with archival and ethnographic work conducted in

Romania, I wire together a postsocialist analysis of techno-imperialism and

technofascism, of disjunctures and cyberghosts, of aftermaths and circuit boards.

Postliberalism, Technofascism, and the post-Cold War Imaginary

In Mr. Robot, an FBI agent chases poster images for the End of the World

258

Party to find the now terrorist “F Society.” At one point, in both desperation and

loneliness, she asks her Amazon Echo AI, Alexa, “Alexa, when is the end of the

world?” To this her robotic machine dispassionately replies with an anthropocenic

forecast of portended planetary destruction, unless something else destroys the world

first. Will the “End of the World” be caused by the anti-capitalist F Society, the

monopolist E Corp, or impending planetary destruction? Whose dystopia will

prevail? Alaina Lemon observes that during the Cold War, technology was used to

feed superstitions on both sides of the Iron Curtain in two ways. First, “both

superpowers cast enemies alternatively as manufacturers of ideological robots or as

slaves to suspicion superstition” (2018, xvii). Second, both sides launched enormous

efforts to use technology to shape imaginaries, opinions, and everyday life. What

technological continuities and discontinuities must be excavated to understand the

post-Cold War condition in which hacks replace bombs as technological threat, and in

which paranoia lingers on and accumulates? What other rearrangements must be

examined, particularly amidst contexts that scholars of postsocialism are marking as

the rearticulated crisis of liberalism?

By this, I refer to what Dace Dzenovska and Larisa Kurtović (2017) describe

as a global crisis in which what had been presumed to be the unilateral Western

liberal endpoint of history following the collapse of Eastern European state socialism

has been called into question with Trump’s electoral success. This era, what many

liberals have glossed as the “Trumpocalypse,” unravels post-Cold War presumptions

that the United States, the so-called “leader of the Free World,” would lead liberal

internationalism into Fukuyama’s “end of history” (2006). While Trump espouses

259

neoliberalism like his predecessors, he does so by performing what Nikhil Pal Singh

marks as a form of “racial nationalism,” restoring “native ‘American capitalism’ to its

place in the sun” (2017, 33, 170). Invoking what theorists have warned as the rise of

an “inverted totalitarianism” (Wolin 2008), or the renewal of “imperialism beyond the

liberal variant” (Mazower 2008), Trump’s victory materially threatens immigrants,

people of color, anarchists, women, queers, socialists, and more, as well as common

time.

As liberalism’s mortality is thrown into question, Cold War battles for its

triumph are newly conjured. Revolution has long been a founding structure for

organizing modern political time, tethering old endings to new beginnings, futures

past, and futures still being dreamt, while sparking arrays of aftermaths haunted by

past political possibilities (Scott 2013). As the Cold War is bookmarked by

revolutions, beginning with those of antifascism and ending with those of liberal

democracy, the dawn of “postliberalism” is haunted by an entanglement of antifascist,

socialist, fascist, and neoliberal fantasies. As the Cold War was also marked by

techno revolutions, from the bomb to cybernetics, techno-utopics and dystopics are

also conjured anew.

To understand the recoding of liberalism in the technological present,

Atanasoski and Vora offer the analytic of technoliberalism, or the reanimation of

liberalism and fascism (2019, 28). These, they mark, are codependent twin pillars of

US imperialism, rooted in Cold War discourses of automation and robotics, mediating

the tension between totalitarianism and democratic liberalism. In the wake of Trump

and the white loss that his presidency organizes against, Cold War fears of socialist

260

robotics are summoned. And yet, automation, as practiced within techno-imperial

geographies, espouses racial capitalism and technofascism.

Here I am particularly interested in how racial technocapitalism functions to

Orientalize and pathologize Eastern European postsocialist technoculture. In this way,

Romania—as geographically a part of but not quite a part of Europe—is read, as

Maria Todorova elaborates, as Europe’s “incomplete self,” perpetually awaiting

enlightenment (1997, 18). Post-Cold War readings of Romania, and of Eastern

European hackers more broadly, hinges upon prior Orientalist forms which both

fetishize and disparage Eastern European racialized illiberalism. Orientalism, while

alive and well before and during state socialism, has shifted in unique ways in

postsocialist times. Technoliberalism masks the raciality of this process today, as well

as a resurgence of fascism valorizing pre-socialist techno-urban imaginaries.

Technofascism can thus be understood as a postsocialist politic and fantasy

garbed in technoliberal forms that updates pre-socialist racial values. Judith Butler

argues that in these strange times, there has been a novel trend in which fascism

appropriates leftist language and identity (2019). Here, I suggest that in parallel,

fascist tendencies become sheltered by liberalism to pathologize anticapitalism. While

hacktivist groups such as F Society rearrange both Cold War and communist

technological imagery, racial technocapitalism’s own fiction writers continue to

mobilize Cold War apocalyptic visions, as without the existence of a Cold War

inimical, their own teleology remains unhinged. However, in actual US Cold War

contexts, these enemies were largely framed by rightwing McCarthyism and

Reaganism; today, liberals have taken up the charge, conflating Communist, Eastern

261

European, and hacker as the illiberal harbinger of liberalism’s potential collapse (as I

go one to show in this chapter). Meanwhile the far right continues to pathologize all

who aren’t male, white, and capitalist, much as it always has done. How do we

understand this rearrangement, one in which Cold War optics have become

technologically scrambled in new ways upon Masco’s utopian-apocalyptic circuit

board? Decoding this encryption is essential in order to theorize the technological

crises of liberalism and fascism in postsocialist temporalities.

Postsocialist methods are helpful tools in doing so, particularly as they

facilitate examination of allegorical breaks and continuities, as well as what Scott

describes as “the temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe, the temporal

disjunctures involved in living on in the wake of past political time, amid the ruins,

specifically, of postsocialist and postcolonial futures past” (2013, 2). In techno-

imperial contexts, aftermaths of political catastrophe are haunted by Cold War ghosts,

now transforming bombs and anti-capitalist hackers into terroristic communists. Of

course, individuals hack into private email and bank accounts regularly to extract and

exploit information-capital with no attached political manifesto, but nevertheless

hackers remain divided in the liberal post-Cold War imaginary as either good

(organizing hackathons funded by or benefiting entrepreneurs, startups, and

governments), or as malignant (illiberally coordinating attacks against capitalist

interests, whether explicitly political or not) (Coleman 2013). But there is more at

work than simply the reconfiguration of the weaponry and enemy, as their

transformation specifically coincides with a postsocialist rearrangement of race, class,

and geopolitics.

262

Speculative Fictions of Zombie Socialism and Cybersecurity

Just months after the release of Mr. Robot’s second season featuring the FBI’s

search for F Society, a new End of the World imaginary began circulating the liberal

imaginary. Rather than the 5/9 or 9/11-era, this one became known as that of the 11/9,

that of the Trumpocalypse. Largely ignored was that Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton,

also ran a campaign built on Wall Street ties (Walsh 2016), and that throughout her

political career, she has detonated apocalyptic conditions upon countless people

within and beyond the US (Shulte 2016), in turn severing her from much of the left.

Although Esmail was a Clinton supporter, F Society is positioned against the

corporate Wall Street ties that both the Democratic and Republic Parties have

amassed. For instance, they cut off the brass testicles of the Wall Street bull during

what is portrayed as Obama’s presidency, dropping the severed metal detachment

through the skylight of the Capitol dome during session. Yet while E Corp is run by

CEO Phillip Price, who denigrates Trump (the latter depicted as running for office in

Seasons 2 and 3), much of E Corp’s architecture was intentionally modeled on New

York’s Trump Tower. Further, Esmail contextualized that he had Trump in mind

during the first season’s epic opening monologue about the top one percent of the one

percent, or “the guys that play God without permission.” Here Elliot, F Society’s

leader whose split personality is also Mr. Robot, chastises not just the Prices/Trumps

of the world, but the very technological infrastructure constituted by (and

constituting) liberalism. As he spews to his therapist upon being asked, “And what is

it about society that disappoints you so much?”:

263

Oh, I don't know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man

even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's

that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself is just one big

hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary bullshit

masquerading as insight. Our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we

voted for this. Not with our rigged elections but with our things, our property,

our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know we do this, not because

“Hunger Games” books make us happy, but because we want to be sedated.

Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards. . . Fuck society.

It is thus fair to venture that F Society opposes the Trumps, Prices, and Clintons of

the world, along with their attendant landscapes—geographies that while discursively

and materially different, are nevertheless constituted by veneration of similar things,

property, and money, sewn together through technologies of fake intimacy and

exploitation. Such worlds have been grown out of the premise of post-Cold War era

in which the triumph and inevitability of neoliberalism endures. And, until recently, it

had been presumed that this globality would continue to signal its reign with the flag

of democratic liberalism.

After Clinton’s defeat, the Democratic Party began blaming outsiders rather

than its own failings, from poor white Americans to social media, from the hacker

Julian Assange to “the Russians” who hacked Democratic Party emails, revealing a

Democratic Party plot to undermine the Party’s populist socialist candidate, Bernie

264

Sanders. The hack was claimed by moniker Guccifer 2.0, who asserted Romanian

origin. The original Guccifer, the 1.0 so to speak, was the Romanian Marcel Lehel

Lazăr, fashioning his portmanteau to conjure “the style of Gucci and the light of

Lucifer.” He first made headlines in 2013, after hacking into the accounts of nearly

100 American politicians and celebrities, including that of Clinton’s former advisor,

revealing that Clinton had been illegally using her private email server while in

office. Guccifer was caught and extradited to the US. Since then, he has admitted to

having executed his hacks in Romania while using proxy servers in Russia.

But Lazăr was not behind the 2016 hacks; this time it was “Guccifer 2.0,” who

claimed Romanian origin, but who cybersecurity firms, contracted by the Democratic

Party, found to be Russian. Based on flimsy evidence and brazen clues written in

Cyrillic referencing the Soviet secret police, the cybersecurity firms connected

Guccifer to Russian hacking groups named by the firms as Fancy Bear and Cozy

Bear—bears being Russophobic stereotypes.14 While more evidence has subsequently

been produced, what I note here is the speculative nature of original allegations

mobilized Cold War grammars. For instance, the CIA described the cyberattacks as

cutting into “to the heart of our free society” (McCain et al., 2017), projecting what

WikiLeaks described as neo-McCarthyite hysteria (Feliks 2017).

Regardless of the veracity of Russian coordination, what interests me here are

the anticommunist fictions saturating the “Case Against Russia.” For instance,

cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect, who also analyzed the hack, concluded their

investigative report by invoking George Lucas’s Star Wars’ prequel, “Episode III:

Revenge of the Sith,” another Cold War speculative fiction (ThreatConnect 2017).

265

First released in 1977, the space opera chronicles the struggles between good and

evil, the former epitomized by the enlightened Jedi knights, the latter by the Empire,

its Death Star, and the dark figures of Darth Vader and the Emperor Palpatine.

ThreatConnect focuses on Palpatine, an evil Sith lord disguised as a “good” politician

who attempts to influence Senate members, highlighting his proclamation that all

remaining Jedi will be hunted down and defeated. Embedding an image of a Star

Wars poster in their analysis, ThreatConnect mobilizes against “Dark Side”

propaganda, conflating Putin with Palpatine and his Death Star.

Not only has Star Wars been argued to reference Cold War space battles, but

also growing racism within Silicon Valley, today’s heart of cybersecurity. As Curtis

Marez observes, Lucas was influenced by his childhood landscape which, at the time,

was being mobilized by a Latinx farmworker socialist movement largely led by Cesar

Chavez (2013). Cold War rhetoric and ongoing McCarthyism read this and other

nearby social justice movements from the Black Panthers to the Brown Berets as

threats to US liberalism and to the white pastoral landscape of Silicon Valley (Chung

2016). By studying Lucas’s influences and oeuvre, Marez argues that Darth Vader

can be read as demonological rendering of Chavez himself, attempting to lead a

socialist rebellion within the heart of a growing technoculture. In the telescoping of

the galactic tale into the present, ThreatConnect positions their enemy as the dark

socialist other.

And yet Putin, like Trump, is a white capitalist man, squashing social justice

movements left and right. Similarly, as Lemon observes, during the Cold War, both

the US and the Soviet Union “pressed for dismantling colonial orders that had

266

produced slavery, resource extraction, and white nationalism.” Yet both superpowers

“continued to build upon colonial institutions and imperial infrastructures” (2018,

xvii). Arguably, this reliance and construction has endured into the current post-Cold

War moment. But then, how is it that Putin/Palpatine becomes read as a racialized

socialist, and why is it that Russian/Romanian cyber threats are still racialized as

“bears” by the West, much as they were centuries ago?

Alexei Yurchack suggests that “if Trump’s win is reduced simply to his

alleged collusion with a foreign power, real politics become displaced onto the

stereotyped figures of foreign agents and patriots who oppose them” (2017, 3). These

stereotyped and upturned figures become central characters in the scrambling of

anticommunist fiction upon the circuit board of the postsocialist present. They rely

upon reading socialism from the side of the post-Cold War victors, so that, in the

words of Konrad Petrovszky and Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, the 1989 “revolutions” are

read as “the conclusion of a natural process that brought about the demise of the

second pathological ideology of the 20th century (communism, following fascism),”

with the postsocialist era written “as the beginning of a global transition towards

‘normality’” (2011, 40). This liberal mode of historiography effectively

straightjackets socialist upon fascism, positioning both as antithetical to neoliberal

normality, deleting historic and contemporary entanglements of antifascist and

socialist politics. As Liviu Chelcea and Oana Druță suggest, “Socialism—as a zombie

and ghost—is important in the production of neoliberal monoglossia and guilt by

association for those who challenge the dominant wisdom of trickle-down economics,

thus supporting the worldview and, ultimately, the interests of the winners of post-

267

1990 transition” (2016, 522). This anticommunism, or “zombie socialism,” not only

positions socialist projects (and their endurance) as a void, but also obscures the

violence of capitalist injections into former socialist spaces.

Ethnographic practices are helpful in thinking beyond the reproducing and

scrambling of zombie socialist stereotypes upon the utopic-apocalyptic circuit board.

In the words of Chari and Verdery, “As important as post-Cold War ethnographies

are to perceiving continuities, they also help us understand discontinuities in the

making of post-Cold War enemies” (2009, 26). These ethnographies help interrogate

how, in the aftermath of state socialism (as well as numerous colonialisms), the

enemy is reconfigured through the employment of “racial technologies and expertise

to differentiate spaces and populations through their contrasting propensities to life

and death” (2009, 27). By reading the allegorical tactics of liberalism’s defenders

ethnographically, it becomes clear that both new and old modes of racializing threat

entwine, facilitating the pathologization of Eastern European hackers.

The zombie socialism employed by cybersecurity firms like ThreatConnect

illuminates the racial technologies and expertise they rescramble to ultimately sell

products and knowledge that will somehow save liberal US democracy from. These

scrambled imaginaries, informed by the Cold War allegorical, embed older fictions

into new scripts. For instance, in 2015, Norton Security, a Silicon Valley firm most

known for their Symantec security product, released an 18-minute documentary titled

“The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet,” directed by Sean Dunne. The film,

embedded on their site, focuses on cybercrimes emergent from Râmnicu Vâlcea, the

Romanian city infamously known as “Hackerville” by the West (Bhattacharjee 2011).

268

Featuring an interview with Guccifer 1.0 conducted in a Romanian prison prior to

extradition, the film is set in dark, grey frames, summoning Cold War imaginaries of

dystopic Communist Romania, aligning Communist-era materialities into pathologic

landscapes (Fehérváry 2013). Also featured is hacker Tinkode (Răzvan Manole

Cernăianu), ill-famed for having hacked the Pentagon, the US Army, YouTube, SUN

Microsystems, Google, NASA, Facebook, and more. While Guccifer stands by his

cyber activity, driven by anti-US imperial and anti-corporate politics, Tinkode, after

being apprehended was offered a plea bargain to work for the “other side”—

cybersecurity experts.

The film, shot in the cold, stark winter, and stylized to sensationalize the

bleakness of Romanian cyber-criminality in postsocialist Râmnicu Vâlcea, appeals to

US Cold War sketchy and illiberal dystoptics. Some characters are filmed against

crumbling Communist-era buildings and icy ground, wearing hoodies that obscure

their identities—something akin to Cold War ruinous ghosts, both materially and

virtually haunting the “free world.” Yet viewers are offered redemptive liberal hope

by Kevin Haley, a “global expert in the fight against cybercrime.” Haley advertises

Norton’s own Symantec Global Intelligence Network. Viewers can easily navigate to

Norton’s page from the video, thereby ensuring that their digital life will never be

hacked by a Romanian cybercriminal from “the most dangerous town on the

internet.” In this sense, the Silicon Valley security firm both creates a Cold War

narrative and product-based remedy—the ultimate technocapitalist plot.

Hacking Transition

269

To pathologize underground Râmnicu Vâlcea hacking culture without

critically examining the deployment of zombie socialism is to replay and scramble

Western Cold War ghost stories. It is also to, like a zombie, feed off the living dreams

of anti-capitalist alterity with the deadness of capitalist omnipotence. After all,

capitalist injections upon the local Râmnicu Vâlcea economy have been largely

disastrous, with former state-owned factories such as Râmnicu Vâlcea Chemical

Works collapsing, leading to widespread unemployment and hacking evolving as one

of many means of postsocialist survival. But also, informatics and hacking have a

long history in Romania, ones instructive to gloss through here in understanding the

IT present.

It was during socialism that desires of technological modernity were in part

what drove Romania to partially separate from Moscow’s bloc trade agreement.

Rather than producing food for the bloc, Romania wanted to develop heavy industry

and technology, landing it a dissident status that would only grow after Ceaușescu

took over. Determined to excel in informatics, polytechnics, and cybernetics, he

developed research centers throughout the state. These specialized in hacking

Western products and licenses, so that by the time of the regime’s collapse, Romania

was exporting the most computers in the Eastern bloc. However, after transition, the

previously state-owned Felix computer factory was divided into joint stock

companies and sold, much like Râmnicu Vâlcea Chemical Works, and real estate

speculators determined that the land that the factory sat upon was worth more than the

factory itself. Buildings and land were sold, and Felix became a ghost, haunted by

270

futures past. Meanwhile, Western companies came in to take advantage of the new

market, and IBM absorbed Felix workers, meanwhile delivering messages to

Romanian managers about the technological merits of capitalism and the

backwardness of socialism.

And yet, despite these early attempts to draw Romania into the global time of

neoliberalism, resistances and refusals ensued, some more intentional than others. For

instance, despite IBM’s early imperatives on Felix and its attempts to build a market,

it failed and was forced to retreat at first because Romanians preferred to assemble

their own computers from imported parts. As I’ve learned through dozens of

conversations, this practice of hacking hardware and soon software too became

everyday practice. People would collect Romanian computer magazines that

instructed readers on how to backtrack, develop DIY radio, pirate software, theses on

virtual reality and techno-skepticism, and even “the phenomenon of the hacker.” In

1996, according to the Business Software Alliance, 86 percent of Romania’s software

had been pirated, given that there was little legislation protecting intellectual property

(Fiscutean 2014b). At first, pirated software was not sold for profit, a phenomenon

that only began after inflation skyrocketed in the late 1990s. Still today, Romania’s

piracy rate is twice that of the EU, and ideas of paying for films, music, and software

is considered relatively ludicrous amongst the public. As one hacker contextualized

while telling me of her own forays into hacking in the 1990s, “We were just

downloading things because we couldn’t afford anything. In the US, you pay $15 for

a CD. No big deal. But here, that’s more than lots of people in the 90s were making in

one day alone. It’s not like CDS are less expensive here. It’s the same.” This is also

271

the case with software, books, and games, he told me.

By the time the internet emerged, DIY practices grew even stronger. Inspired

by television sharing practices of the prior decades, many Romanians bought internet

packages from state companies, and then set up independent networks in their blocs

to sell to neighbors. Because internet dial-up packages were expensive at first, and

given the intense poverty that post-transition incited, generally one person would buy

internet and then share or sell it to people in their block, wiring cables haphazardly.

As people had already been pirating satellite stations from bordering countries during

Communism, defying the Communist Party’s restrictive one (and briefly two)

national television channels, and as the magazines taught wiring techniques. Stringing

cables across apartments and blocks of flats “was really not so fancy,” I’ve been told.

LAN networks and soon fiber optics came in to remedy the slowness of dialup (which

would get even slower every night when the downloading would begin en masse),

again strung haphazardly. Today still, telephone poles, from Cluj to Bucharest, and

adorned in a massive array of cables, mostly fiber optics, invoking a sort of organic

chaos.

Writing of jugaad, or hacking practices in India that exist outside of the

organized sectors in India, Amit Rai theorizes hacking and DIY infrastructure

creation as “an everyday practice that potentializes relations that are external to their

terms, opening different domains of action and power to experimentation sometimes

resulting an easily valorized workaround, sometimes producing space-times that

momentarily exit from the debilitating regimes of universal capital” (2019, 6). These

practices become part of urban metabolic processes that permit certain bypasses,

272

patches, and workarounds. Over time, they become stabilized into the official

network, yet their existence remains obscured and only known to those initiated into

the system. DIY wiring in Romania performed a similar function, although unlike in

India, today most wires have become absorbed into corporate networks, or left

hanging abandoned.

In 2018, Bucharest-based playwright David Schwartz debuted Portofele

Virtuale: Proiect Generația Y (Virtual Wallet: Generation Y Project) in Râmnicu

Vâlcea, based upon hacking accounts of the city’s youth during the transition period.

Several acts entangle, in which it becomes clear that hacking in the most dangerous

town on the internet was derived through malice, but rather through play and attempts

to profit despite techno-imperialism. Most people that the Western world might label

“hackers” are just those trying to survive in a faltering economy, who engage in

scams and schemes devised in internet cafes and bedrooms alike. As David told me

over coffee one evening after the play’s first debut, he was amazed at how many of

hackers he interviewed were just kids whose parents worked abroad, and who were

able to use their foreign language skills to deceive Westerners online.

For instance, the opening act of the play (funded by and performed in

Râmnicu Vâlcea’s National Theater), “Primul Jaguar (The First Jaguar),” begins in

2004, and features two then ten-year-old friends, Ștefan and Cătă, from a quiet

neighborhood known as Tic Tac. Ștefan’s mom works at the TricoTextil factory,

owned by an Italian firm. His dad is a bodyguard at the Coca-Cola factory.

Meanwhile, Cătă’s father works on a construction site, and his mother is living in

Italy, sporadically sending money back home to her poor family. It was during that

273

period that internet cafes began popping up in Tic Tac. Then, overnight, hordes of

fancy cars, from Jaguars to BMWs, manifested. The audience that I was viewing the

play with were mostly high school students on a Tuesday evening class trip. As

Ștefan and Cătă offered detailed explanations of Tic Tac, the youth surrounding me

began laughing hysterically, perhaps somewhat familiar with the accounts that the

young actors were offering.

As kids, Ștefan and Cătă were excited about the prospect of playing internet

games such as Counterstrike in the cafés, and so they sheepishly began to hang out in

them. They also romanticized the expensive vehicles sprouting up out of the streets,

especially the Jaguar that appeared one day, owned by Ștefan’s upstairs neighbor,

Viorel. Soon, Viorel began asking Ștefan to translate for him online in the internet

café. Ștefan barely knew how to, but called upon another friend, who helped him get

the job done. Before long, Ștefan was making more money than he ever had seen in

his life. Yet, as Ștefan notes, he had no idea what a hacker even was. “I know the

word, in English, but what is a hacker?” he questions.

The play then fast-forwards to seven years later, as Ștefan recounts drinking a

Radler beer one summer evening in Tic Tac. The neighborhood had fallen apart,

despite the presence of scattered Mustang cars and mega-luxury possessions. And all

of a sudden that evening, police swarmed into the neighborhood, looking for Viorel.

Ștefan felt like he was in a really bad videogame, filled with machine guns and

masked officers. After Viorel had been jailed, Ștefan discovered that his upstairs

neighbor had been one of the first hackers in the city. Somehow, through an online

scam that Ștefan had unknowingly assisted in, Viorel had profited from the sales of

274

two million helicopter without having ever really ever sold one.

One of my friends, Vlad, a former “hacker” and currently unemployed,

remembers this transitional period well. Soon, he recounts, people began moving out

of internet cafés and into their own home networks. “It was super easy,” he explained

to me one evening, sitting in our friend’s cooperative underground anarchist bar in

Bucharest where we met a couple of years before and where David also works. “And

it was really good internet. You would just string the cables, and voila.” Also,

because the networks were local and small, it was easy to share music, games,

software, and more. Numerous people have recounted this era to me, often with slight

grins on their faces. There were also tons of internet cafes. “Before internet cafes, in

the 1990s, Bucharest was a pretty dangerous place to just be walking around,” he

remembered. “It was sketchy. But then the internet cafes popped up, and suddenly the

hooligans who were roaming the streets jumped into the internet cafes to play games

and hack.” It was because of cafes that he recounts the streets becoming less sketchy.

Maybe he himself was sketchy too though, he laughed. “And then eventually

everyone got internet in their homes, and the internet cafés dwindled. But a lot of

hacking in the 1990s and early 2000s took place in them,” he reminisced, as a local

DJ friend began amplifying queer techno music in the back of bar.

Vlad and his friends did their hacking through a home network and not in the

internet cafés. They discovered a burgeoning market, he explained, talking above the

beats. Video chatting. While today video chatting is a huge source of employment in

Romania and the Ukraine, in 2000s, Vlad and his friends, after much studying, had

found a way to hack porn video chat services in the US. “The porn industry is divided

275

between the US, Germany, and Japan,” he explained matter-of-factly. “They have the

monopoly. US porn watchers don’t know anything about German or Japanese porn

models as those worlds are contained and separated.” And so, he and his friends

found clips of a German porn model, broke the clips into various segments. They then

pretended to be a Romanian video chat sex worker for in US chat room, where they

would play clips of the German model and pretend to be her. “Back then, a lot of

people didn’t have microphones in their computers, so it was possible to just tell a

client that the mic was broken and only use the text chat function. So, we could really

pretend to be the model.” Vlad didn’t text himself, but rather was in charge of making

fake ID cards for the operation on Photoshop. “I’m really good at this,” he laughed.

His friends would text with US clients, often suggesting that the client might

want to see them do a certain thing, and then they would play the clip of the German

model doing just that. But of course, they weren’t her. “See, hacking isn’t so much

about technology,” he told me. “It’s about deception. Guccifer only made it to 8th

grade, after all,” he recounted, grinning. One of Vlad’s buddies was really into US

basketball, and so sometimes he would talk about basketball with the clients, who

were always so impressed that a Romanian woman knew so much about the subject.

“He’d get paid to type about basketball for hours,” Vlad smiled. They would get

caught a lot, because there was this “screenshot thing” that would monitor the chat

room sites to see if the same images were used repeatedly. But then they’d make a

new IDs and do it again. They made a ton of money. In fact, the US was forced to

change laws around video chatting because of what they did, he explained. “I think

the US was obsessed with us because they’re obsessed with vampires. They think

276

we’re sucking the blood out of their businesses.” Eventually, Vlad and his friends

were forced to stop hacking, in part because people have stopped typing in video

chats, and they couldn’t find a way to adapt their technique.

That was not the only technological development that impeded Vlad’s brief

hacking career. Soon enough, the independent networks became seen as an

extractable commodity for larger networks. Seemingly overnight, larger firms started

bribing everyone into selling their networks, Vlad remembers. He was the last one in

his neighborhood to resist. Sometimes RDS, the large firm that bought the smaller

networks, would work with building administrators to threaten people that if they

didn’t take down their cables, they would get in trouble, citing small technicalities

regarding the size or length of the wiring. Sometimes they would just cut cables. The

buying up and consolidation of smaller networks, like the extraction of the Felix

computer factory, points to the tenor of postsocialist IT exploitation. But specifically,

it reveals that techno-imperialism in Romania is not the establishing of new IT

infrastructure from scratch, but rather parasiting on what was already there.

Following IBM and RDS, an array of Western firms swept into Romania to

appropriate all that they could, from language to labor, from infrastructure to

knowledge. While counter technopublics persist, today, it is more common when

discussing IT with someone to hear tales of their exploitative labor working for

multinational firms, and sometimes dreams of entrepreneurship. Despite that

Romania maintains Europe’s fastest internet—an effect of the proliferation of wiring,

most networks have now been bought up by larger firms, and most people still feel

technologically behind. As a friend who worked for a small Romanian tech company

277

for four years told me, everyone in her office fantasized of one day working for

Oracle, which has a branch in Bucharest’s Pipera neighborhood, haunted by the

specter of Felix. But as another friend told me, after landing a job at Oracle herself,

labor there is numbing, and all she does is answer calls and emails, managing to

sneak in YouTube videos on ten-minute breaks in which her brain can’t do anything

else. Another colleague explained that he is “no more than a slave” in his IT

company, and that all the industry has ever been is a culture of masters and slaves.

The country won’t even allow him to obtain freelancer status, so now he

dreams of landing a job in the West. But is landing an IT job in the West really all

that liberating? For instance, after Elliot obtains a position working for Evil Corp by

day (while by night his alter-ego Mr. Robot tries to destroy the company), he

describes his daily routine:

Blend in. Look bored, broken. Get a blank office stare on my face. This is

how they do it, isn’t it? How they’re able to watch the world fall apart around

them? Because to them, this is normal. It’s all they know. Maybe I can learn

from them. I wish I could see myself through your eyes. Don’t you wish you

could see yourself through mine?

If aspirations of becoming technologically Western mean becoming bored and

zombie-like, perhaps illiberal hacking plots reveal a decolonial politic aimed to crash

the system and engender a runtime error. Perhaps this is what F Society and anti-

capitalist hackers are trying to do – crash the system. Elliot suggests that runtime

278

errors sometimes occur due to corrupted memory. If those dreaming of working for

Western IT firms could see Elliot’s life through their own eyes, perhaps their

aspirations would shatter, corrupting memory programmed by zombie socialism and

its unidirectional optics. In this way, anti-capitalist hackers might be understood as

those who attempt to corrupt the newly configured memory of neoliberalism’s

inevitability and globality, uncovering other memories still lurking beneath.

Hacking Orientalism

As Romanian scammers attempting to make some quick cash, are, in many

ways, hacking transition and techno-imperialism, they also, at times, play the West’s

ongoing Orientalizing of the East. Turning back to Schwartz’s play, we encounter two

bored British IT workers, Paul and Dennis, who work out of a firm in England. In

their five-minute break between monotonous tasks, they turn to eBay. Paul, excitedly

landing upon a shirt for sale, asks Dennis if he’s ever heard of an “I-E.” When Paul

explains that it’s a handmade traditional shirt from Romania, Dennis replies, “From

Romania? I thought they only exported scroungers and cheap labor.” Paul protests, to

which Dennis laughs, “What? Oh, I forgot I'm with Mr. Liberal at the office.” Paul

goes on to explain that his girlfriend’s friend just came back from a Romanian

business trip, where she picked up a lovely handmade blouse with red and blue

flowers stitched around the neckline. It is this type of shirt that, in the play, two

Romanian scammers, Roxana and Marius, are trying to sell on eBay. While one can

buy a traditional Romanian blouse for less than a few euro in Romania (although

handmade ones are indeed expensive), Roxana and Marius began selling them online

279

for 49 euro, noting that the organic objects are handmade from a tiny, traditional

village, and that the pattern around the neck marks “the walk of life.”

Enthusiastically, Paul exclaims, “Wow look at this, it’s proper fancy. I am telling you

Dior has a collection inspired from these ‘yiaaahs.’ They say it’s from a northern

village in ‘Mermoores’ . . . ‘Mairmures.’ They say this area of Romania, the

Carpathians, benefits from one of the most powerful energetic shields of the planet.”

Continuing, “Mate, I’m not joking. Apparently, there are places that have this kind of

energetic charge, places where the earth vibrates.” Elated, Dennis then asks if Paul

can buy ten, since they’re so cheap. By playing into the Western racialization of the

East, Roxana and Marius are able to hack Orientalism and techno-imperialism alike

to make some quick cash. Stories like these abound in Romania, as in many ways,

hacking technoculture grew in order to resist the economic devastation that

postsocialist transition sparked. Of course, hacking was alive and well before 1989,

but it was really after 1989 that it flourished.

Techno-imperialism today parasites upon the remnants of socialist

technoculture and infrastructure. Or, if following Marxist critique, techno-

imperialism sucks the blood of dead socialist economics. After all, in Capital, Marx

employs the allegory of the vampire to describe the violence of capitalist economics.

“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and

lives the more, the more labour it sucks,” he writes (1976, 342). In this way, US

capital is financed by the “capitalized blood of children” (ibid., 920). Comparing

exploitation in the factory system with that of prior peasant appropriation by

landowners, Marx looks to Romania for exemplification: “For Moldavia the

280

regulations are even stricter. ‘The 12 corvée days of the Règlement organique,’ cried

a boyar, drunk with victory, ‘amount to 365 days in the year’” (ibid., 348).

Interestingly, the “Wallachian boyar” in this text happens to be none other

than 15th-century Vlad the Țepeș, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler and Count

Dracula (Neocleous 2003, 670). But what does this mean for blood-sucking US

capitalism to be modeled on an infamous Romanian aristocrat, even before Bram

Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror novel, the latter of which interpreted Vlad Dracul through

British imperial tropes fearful of Eastern contamination? How does one make sense

of the simultaneous Orientalism of the East by the West, as in the case of Dennis and

Paul’s blouse fetish, and the racialization of it as illiberal and seeping with threat to

US democracy?

Although Western capitalism did not originate in Romania, it did emerge

through colonial practices that both extracted from and racialized Eastern Europe,

among many other places (Mark and Slobodian 2018). But that a Romanian medieval

count is used to allegorize the violence of capitalism for Marx speaks to the West’s

longstanding exoticization, paranoia, and squeamishness of the East (Lemon 2018;

Wolff 1994), even in Marxist analysis. After all, per Marx’s own metaphors, we

might understand technologies of extraction as employed in postsocialist Romania as

vampiric. And yet, arguably, the very concept of “vampiric” is vampiric in and of

itself, appropriating an already appropriated figure to articulate the violence of

extraction. But perhaps this double figuration is helpful in understanding the

appropriation of underground technoculture more fully, as well as the longue durée of

Orientalist interpretations of the East. These, I find, are uniquely rearranged and

281

reprogrammed in postsocialist times.

Although early DIY Romanian technoculture and infrastructure defied techno-

imperial imperatives after 1989, techno-imperialism did not give up so easily. In the

2000s, Western firms began sweeping into outsource socialist IT knowledge and

prowess, galvanizing upon legacies of informatics and cybernetics. Also preyed upon

was Romania’s high English proficiency—a talent that many people attribute to the

widespread dissemination of 1990s US television (subtitled and un-subtitled alike).

Even hacking, which emerged to defy early postsocialist neoliberal impositions, and

which built upon socialist-era technological prowess, is now fetishized by

technocapitalism and its technologies of labor extraction, epitomized in corporate-

sponsored hacking parties, tech hub meetups, and the like.

While many hackers such as Tinkode have become absorbed into capitalism

and its zombie socialist interpretations, others have refused sublation. These, as a

post-Cold War phenomenon, are now the Cold War enemy by the Cold War victors.

This figure is said to suck the blood of liberal democracy, threatening invasion at any

time, from my friend Vlad, to more infamous figures such as Guccifer. These figures

are now rendered as parallel figures to Stoker’s Dracula, which was informed by

British imperial literary invasion motifs. In these, the dangerous and contaminated

Eastern European other might at any moment penetrate and destroy the purity of

mainland England (Atanasoski 2013). As Vlad suggested, the US may be so obsessed

with Romanian hackers because the West remains so transfixed with vampires.

Yet at the same time, Dracula also represents capitalist accumulation, vis-à-vis

Marx. As Franco Moretti suggests, “like capital, Dracula is impelled towards a

282

continuous growth, an unlimited expansion of his domain: accumulation is inherent in

his nature” (1988, 94). This interpretation has informed an array of scholars,

including Donna Haraway, who writes: “The vampire is . . . the marauding figure of

unnaturally breeding capital, which penetrates every whole being and sucks it dry in

the lusty production and vastly unequal accumulation of wealth” (1997, 215). In this

way, the threat of the vampire, which gained influence in the West through Orientalist

literary motifs, is combined with the threat of capital, vis-à-vis Marx. But in the case

of postsocialist Romania, source of the originary vampire, it is capital threatening to

destroy techno-imperial defiance. We can thereby see how much Orientalism, as a

racial concept, has become rearranged in postsocialist times. Today, Orientalism

saturates both capitalist manifestations of liberal democracy (which thereby

pathologize the illiberal hacker), and in anti-capitalist readings of capitalism’s

extractive and appropriative technologies. As Haraway suggests, as an undead

figment, the vampire violates classifications and taxonomies, enabling categories to

travel (1997, 214). This, she suggests, is particularly salient in thinking theorizing

race, blood, and contamination.

The contradiction of the vampire illuminates that in post-Cold War contexts, it

is not enough to maintain an anti-capitalist approach in assessing the violence of

techno-imperialism. One needs an anti-capitalistic approach that understands

capitalism’s historic and ongoing reliance upon racism, as scholars of racial

capitalism have well argued. In Robin D. G. Kelley’s words, from its origins,

capitalism “was ‘racial’ not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify

slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western

283

feudal society” (2017). As Cedric Robinson puts it, inter-European racialization was a

colonial process, one that involved settlement, invasion, expropriation, and racial

hierarchy (1983). The original European proletarians were racial subjects, and

included Irish, Jews, Roma, and Slavs. These “were victims of dispossession

(enclosure), colonialism, and slavery within Europe” (Kelley 2017). This has

fomented the racialization of Eastern European people by the West, but also the

double racialization that racialized people such as Roma within Romania experience.

This raciality has long been enfolded into Orientalizing processes that can be traced

by to Enlightenment contexts, if not earlier (Mark and Slobodian 2018; Todorova

1997; Wolff 1994).

The figure of the vampire and its contradictory roles in modern history is

useful in theorizing an array of interpretations, all racial, of postsocialist Romanian

technoculture. The contradiction points to the need of delinking understandings of

socialism from Marxist interpretation alone, or at least from a form of Marxism that

prioritizes class over race. While other chapters in this dissertation project study the

ramifications of Marxist humanism and class-centric analyses upon Romanian Roma

communities, here I point out that today, techno-imperialism functions by racializing

Romanian technoculture. This is another form of racial technocapitalism. While

vampirically exploiting all that might be absorbed by Silicon Valley, it also continues

to exoticize Romania while also pathologizing its deviance. This travels beyond

formerly state-socialist space, informing neo-McCarthyistic portrayals of anti-

capitalist hacking collectives within the heart of techno-imperialism, such as F

Society.

284

IBM and Technofascism

It was in 2011 that Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the game show

Jeopardy’s most successful players, lost to IBM’s Watson AI supercomputer in a San

Francisco tournament. Jennings had been showing momentum, but then, a question

was asked pertaining to an author inspired by William Wilkinson's “An Account of

the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia.” While all three players correctly

guessed Bram Stoker, Watson AI wagered more money, enabling its victory and

galvanizing its fame. Watson AI, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, runs

on a supercomputer powered by 2,880 IBM Power750 cores, or computing brains,

and 15 terabytes of memory. It relies upon DeepQA, a software architecture that

merges natural language with its own structured information. This is a huge

improvement from IBM’s 1997 Deep Blue, which famously beat the chess master

Garry Kasparov through mathematical calculations. Prior to the Jeopardy match, it

had been developing its skills to assist in online healthcare services and banking with

Citigroup, so that fraud and identify theft can be detected. As was joked after

jeopardy, Watson may be on a path towards “HAL,” the computer of Stanley

Kubrick’s other film, the 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey (Takahashi 2011). As many

have since noted, it was no coincidence that HAL’s initials were just one letter in

front of IBM’s. But how did Watson know about Romania and Stoker’s Orientalist

novel?

While Stoker wrote Dracula without ever having traveled to Romania, as it

turns out, Watson had made the journey. As I suggest here, it wasn’t just financial

285

calculations that enabled this post-Cold War robotic AI to win at jeopardy; IBM has a

deep history in Romania, one constitutive of both pre-and postsocialist technological

worlds. So do histories of cybernetics and robotics, ones worth thinking through to

assess how pre-socialist technological pasts are being updated in the postsocialist

technofascist present. While IBM rushed into Romania after socialism ended in 1989,

absorbing Romania’s technological workforce and its national Felix computer

factory, leading to the factory’s disintegration, this was not its first visit.

In Romania, the word “computer” has traditionally been calculator (although

now people often just say computer). Thus when going through archives at

Bucharest’s National Archives, I was surprised to find mention of calculatoare

(computers) that predated normative narratives of Romania’s first computer, the

CIFA-1, built by Victor Toma in 1957 in the National Physics Institute outside of

Bucharest in Măgurele (today the Institute is home to the world’s largest nuclear laser

project, ELI—Extreme Light Infrastructure, largely financed by the European

Regional Development Fund, while provided parts from France). How could it be that

there were calculatoare being used in 1938, I wondered? Were there other hidden

firsts in the archives yet to be uncovered?

Technically, the calculatoare that I found were written as mașini electrice and

electrocontabila, what we might refer to as simple calculators. I would have assumed

that they were just simple counting machines, but what confused me was that in 1938

and 1941, they were being shipped to Romania’s National Institute of Statistics by the

Compania Electrocontabila Watson S.A.R. headquartered at the International

Business Machines Corporation at 590 Madison Avenue in New York – the

286

headquarters of yes, IBM. I found these records in the archives of Sabin Manuilă,

who had been leading the National Statistics Institute in the interwar era, in creating a

national census with which the fascist regime could target Jews and Roma. As a

former student of the eugenicist Iului Moldovan, Manuilă claimed that Jews were

“not a racial, but an economic problem,” but also a “sentimental” one (1934, 12-13).

Meanwhile, he asserted that Roma, “Romania's racial issue,” people who he

described as subversive and dysgenic, should be forcibly sterilized (Bucur 2005, 333;

Thorne 2011, 185-187; Turda and Gillette 2014, 229). Meanwhile, wary of

miscegenation, he supported Jewish segregation laws, and even proposed creating a

“Superior Council for the Protection of the Race” (Turda 2007, 438). He worked for

the criminalization of sex work, creating surveys to push his agenda. But how to

implement his white heteronormative future? As he determined, a census was needed

to determine where racialized bodies were, so that plans could be made accordingly.

The 1930 census had showed 756,930 Jewish people in Romania, but in 1941,

Germany claimed that half of Romania’s Jews were eliminated, but that still two

million remained (Black 2001, 382). A new census was needed to verify how many

Jew and Roma remained, but how? As it turns out, IBM was instantly ready to assist

him.

Creating machines for census counting is in fact part of IBM’s own “origin”

story. In the late 19th century, US census employee Herman Hollerith came up with

the idea of punch cards to be used to create reliable demographic census data. It was

the German Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft corporation, or Dehomag that

created a license for such a tool, which it sold to the US industrialist Charles Flint,

287

cementing the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, headed up Thomas

Watson (Black 2001, 33). Soon Watson took over the company, rebranding it

International Business Machines (IBM), and making Dehomag as subsidiary (ibid.,

44). After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Watson was quick to establish a business

relationship with him and the Nazi enthusiastic Dehomag, creating technology that

could count Roma, Jews, queers, Communists, and more to help with fascist

purification. Watson himself began what would be biannual excursions to Germany in

1933, financing the country’s first IBM factory in the midst of increasing racial

violence. In 1937, he even received a medal from Hitler (ibid., 243). As Edwin Black

tracks in his book on IBM and Nazism (2001), Watson saw Nazi Germany as a

business opportunity, and granted Dehomag powers in other Nazified countries.

When IBM expanded to Poland as World War II started, its sole purpose was

to provide Nazis with extermination technology and eliminate calculator competition

(ibid., 107). Not only were IBM’s punch card machines used for censuses, but as

Black reveals, also tracking and coordinating freight train routes to concentration

camps, using up to 200 million punch cards in the process (ibid., 270). Archives

reveal that IBM’s subsidiary, Compania Electrocontabila Watson, was established in

Bucharest in 1938, claiming $240,000 in equipment, leasable machines, and punch

cards. The subsidiary primarily worked with the Communications Ministry, statistical

offices, census bureaus, and railroads. IBM Europe fulfilled Romania’s orders, with

IBM New York closely monitoring all developments. Meanwhile, the Compania

Electrocontabila Watson’s facility in Bucharest, with its own Swift Press, printed

over twenty million punch cards annually (Black 2001, 387). In 1941, Manuilă began

288

his lofty new census project, which spanned ten days and employed 29,000 census

takers, resulting in a complete inventory or all people, property, assets, and even

animals in Romania. IBM designed questions and hired specially trained enumerators

to specifically determine if someone was Jewish even if they were not overtly

“Jewish-seeming.” Further, one report specifies that if someone perceived as Roma

declined to admit Roma ancestry, the census taker should write “Țigan” (ibid., 384).

This data was then used by the fascist Marshal Antonescu, who, right before Romania

joined the war in 1941, demanded lists of all Jews, Communists, and sympathizers

throughout the country.

He also called for the shipping of all Jews between the Siret and Prut rivers to

concentration camps on trains already scheduled, working with his Second Section

intelligence unit and three statistical offices to monitor racial groups (ibid., 385).

Continued census practices, or “the science of the state” (Foucault 2004),

resulted in the deaths of at least 270,000 Jews and 10,000 Roma in Romania (Kelso

2013). After the war, blame was placed entirely on Germany, obviating the role that

Romanians played, but also that of the US IT company. Meanwhile, IBM filed

compensation claims for machine damage. Obviated was the role that IBM played in

Romania’s own sociotechnical imaginaries. As Sheila Jasanoff observes, while

individuals and small groups may harbor sociotechnical visions, when the vision

spreads, it becomes an imaginary, encoding “not only visions of what is attainable

through science and technology but also of how life ought, or ought not, to be lived;

in this respect they express a society’s shared understandings of good and evil” (2015,

4). In this way, sociotechnical imaginaries are mobilized through technology to inhere

289

specific futures, in this case that of eugenics. By using human and non-human data

collection, IBM and the racist state enumerated “commodification and dispossession

through accounting” (McKittrick and Weheliye 2017, 32).

One of the men working for the National Statistics Institute during Manuilă

and IBM’s census was Sterian Pompiliu, who today, at the age of 100, is considered

the oldest blogger in Romania (Matzal 2018). Mostly he writes about what is

happening at the Moses Rosen senior center, a home for Jewish elders on the far

edges of Bucharest (named after Bucharest’s chief rabbi during socialism). I’ve had

the pleasure of meeting Mr. Pompiliu at the center, where today seniors collaborate

with the Macaz Theatre Coop, making political plays about political futures past and

those yet to come. Most members of the coop identify as antifascist and either

anarchist or socialist, as do the Moses Rosen seniors with whom they collaborate.

Pompiliu’s own politics grow out of his experiences growing up in 1920s

Bucharest, when he enjoyed working on Abascus calculators in school. After, he

enrolled ASE, but he was expelled after the banning of all Jewish students from

university courses. Soon after, laws were passed to expropriate Jewish property, and

Pompiliu, homeless, was forced to sleep on a straw bed in a make-shift lean-to. It was

during this time that he began working at the National Statistics Institute on the

1940’s census. But, unlike others working there, because he was Jewish, he wasn’t

paid, his labor exploited. Little did he know that the Institute was part of an endeavor

that was decimating his own community.

Today, there are thousands of Romanians whose cheap labor is exploited by

Western firms in the name of offshoring, many of whom are paid just fractions of

290

their Western counterparts, and many of whom have little idea about material effects

of the technologies and companies of which their surplus labor enforces, from that of

racialized surveillance to that of war. After all, as during the Cold War, in post-Cold

War contexts, the US’s own imperialism accumulates power by entangling with IT,

creating increasingly violent and racist machines. From Google’s contracts with

Boston Dynamics and Project Maven, Apple’s with the Flexible Hybrid Institute, and

Amazon’s with the CIA, the list of techno militarism is long. In the case of IBM,

post-Cold War, the company has been issued 29 US military contracts, totaling

$866,190,707 (Military Industrial Complex 2016). Also, in post-Cold War contexts,

companies such as these have increasingly offshored their labor, in which, as the

previous chapter revealed, Romania has become an offshoring antipode.

However, Silicon Valley imperialism in Romania is not only a postsocialist

phenomenon, as its template is pre-socialist fascism. Just as postsocialist property

relations reamplify those of pre-socialist times in the name of property restitution (as

I explored in previous chapters), so do they in the realm of post-1989 technological

production and materiality. Why is it though that Siliconized narratives obscure the

racial technocapitalist histories upon which they rest, not to mention those that they

constitute in the present? Today, IBM boasts its Watson AI, a deep learning business

artificial intelligence aimed at improving business efficiency worldwide. But where

did this deep learning come from? Is its algorithm informed by what Watson himself

learned in fascist Europe, a space that he found primed for economic growth? How

much of this deep learning informs the company’s own calculi to offshore labor,

including in Bucharest or Brașov, where it is not just artificial intelligence but actual

291

human labor filing the company’s techno-imperial coffers? These questions all point

to the fact that in Romania’s postsocialist technological present (an era in part

designed by IBM as it rushed in to capitalize upon socialist-era computing and the

Felix computer factory), cannot be understood without understanding the ways in

which postsocialist techno-imperialism updates a pre-socialist technofascist form.

Watson AI might appear the updated Cold War HAL of 2001: A Space

Odyssey. But it is not just that. Its materiality builds upon that of the interwar

electronic counting machines and the attempted fascist imperiality that they mapped

and calculated. Might it make sense, in assessing post-Cold War fears of the

Trumpocalypse, to look towards the pre-socialist technofascist past (which did indeed

attempt to annihilate entire populations) rather than that of socialism?

Hacking Doomsday Time

In Mr. Robot, F Society’s great opposition comes from Trump-like E Corp

CEO, Phillip Price, a man who has always desired to be “the most powerful person in

the room.” Elucidating his fantasy in monologue, while lounging in his Trump tower

as protesters gather below, Price is framed by a satirical wall map of Europe. Drawn

by Karl Lehmann-Dumont in Dresden in 1914, this cartography, “Humoristische

Karte von Europa im Jahre 1914” (Humorous Map of Europe 1914),

anthropomorphically displaces nations with twisted figures, elucidated in its

footnotes. A propaganda piece made from the perspective of German nationalists, the

map features a German soldier holding France by the throat while beating a Russian

bear, the latter also being stung by a swarm of German bees. In Price’s office nearby

292

hangs a newspaper article of the same period, announcing the assassination of

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that sparked World War I and that instigated the

demise of some empires and rise of others. These propaganda pieces articulate Price’s

alignment with pre-War Germany/Austria, the hotbed of growing imperial strength

and racial eugenics strong enough to displace prior imperial forms while attempting

to wipe out entire populations. “The End of the World” as it had been known.

Continuing his monologue, Price wryly suggests that while he has almost

succeeded in becoming the most important person in every room, one or maybe two

people still stand in his way. Although he doesn’t name his rival, viewers deduce that

he is referring to China’s Minister of State Security, Zhang. Throughout the show,

Zhang and Price battle for security powers and influence, but unbeknownst to Price,

Zhang plays another key role on the show as well: Whiterose. Whiterose, a

transgender hacker obsessed with time, leads a Chinese hacking collective, the Dark

Army, in collaborating with F Society to take down Evil Corp. Always carrying a

timepiece, which she uses to track the short amount of time she allocates to anyone

she meets, Whiterose claims that her time is too valuable to be wasted. Meanwhile

her Zhang persona is also obsessed with time, keeping a room in his home full of

clocks. When the FBI agent who had been tracking the End of the World Party poster

accidentally wanders into the room, Zhang politely approaches her, explaining that

the clocks are kept as a ticking reminder of mortality. But also, he enticingly

questions:

Have you ever wondered how the world would look if the 5/9 Hack had never

happened? In fact, some believe there are alternate realities playing out that very

293

scenario, with other lives we're leading, and other people that we’ve become. The

contemplation moves me very deeply. Of course, Whiterose/Zhang live two different

lives, one as a government official with ties to E Corp, one as anti-corporate hacker.

But Whiterose’s obsession with time and alternative realities, a contemplation that

moves her deeply, instructs a particular reading of postsocialist temporality.

The ticking reminder of mortality that Whiterose is obsessed with points not

to the inevitable end of one person’s life, but of entire worlds’ inexorable demise—a

condition bound to both socialist and postsocialist contexts. As she tells Elliot/Mr.

Robot, who frequently hacks into people’s personal accounts, “You hack people, I

hack time.” To Whiterose, hacking means not simply rearranging one person’s life,

but rather the beginnings and ends of eras and revolutions, rearranging entire worlds.

Both socialist and postsocialist temporalities are marked by such ends and

beginnings. Just as mid-20th century fascism was hacked by anti-capitalist and

antifascist movements, leading to the dawn of the Communist era, state socialist

temporality was hacked by Western liberal democracy, precipitating postsocialism.

Today, it seems as though this liberal era is on the verge of becoming postliberal as

fascist forces grow.

In this postliberal moment, both people and time are being hacked. One can

hack people, much like Elliot/Mr. Robot, who lives two different lives and

understands two different timelines (one the self-destructive Elliot who hacks into

people’s personal accounts to hold them accountable for abusive acts, the other, the

bold leader of F Society endeavoring to destroy Evil Corp). One can even hack the

inimical, rearranging enemy configuration. But also, one can hack time, much like

294

Whiterose, rearranging pasts, futures, beginnings, and ends. What happens when, as

in Mr. Robot, these different genres of hacking occur simultaneously? What does this

simultaneity say about postsocialism?

It was at the beginning of the Cold War, in 1949, that global scientific

standard of time materialized. The atomic clock, created by the US National Bureau

of Standards, lead to the International Standard of Units establishing global criterions

for the length of a second: 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation correlative with the

transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. In Mr. Robot, the

same calculus of radiation used to measure each passing tick on Whiterose’s watch

was used to gauge clocks on both sides of the Iron Curtain during socialism. Susan

Buck-Morss has argued that Soviet modernity, as a twin project (even if failed) of

Western modernity, is just as rooted post-Enlightenment taxonomies and

temporalities as Western liberal democracy. As she writes, “Against the often-

repeated story of the West’s winning the Cold War and capitalism’s historical

triumph over socialism, the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in

the Western modernizing tradition that its defeat cannot but place the whole Western

narrative into question” (2002, xii). For instance, both sides of the Cold War shared

similar understandings of the second, of each atomic measurement of passing time.

From the space race to competition between informatics and intelligence

projects, technology was at heart of this antagonism, bifurcated around culture,

politics, and economics, yet cohered around a similar understanding of progress.

While Buck-Morss traces this back to the Enlightenment, materially it can also be

traced to the cohesion of the second—a formation that transpired at the very

295

beginning of the Cold War.

And yet, despite state socialism’s post-Enlightenment similarities with

Western colonial modernity, socialist societies were differently organized around

socialist understandings of techno-urbanism, community, equality, and public access,

as well as legacies of antifascist and anti-capitalist organizing (Boatcă 2012;

Țichindeleanu 2013). These solidified “intractable spaces, discontinuous histories,

and resistant geographies that interrupted the flows of global capital as well as the

continuity of West-European colonial orders of governance” (Karkov and

Valiavicharska 2018, 25). In this way, despite the forward ticking of each second, the

worlds that each second organized were different. Could it be that post-Cold War

specters can’t escape this atomic-level tension – a tautness held in place by similar

measurements of atomic time that upheld different, parallel, and nevertheless

entangled worlds?

We may not be able to escape the materiality of the atomic clock that, since

1949, has been binding contradictory time globally. However, we may be able to

experience different timelines simultaneously, as Whiterose mused, thereby

engendering a runtime error. The possibility of this error holds different potentialities

and imaginaries – from the apocalyptic to the utopic. Within this atomic era, there is a

persistent revising of antecedent time, pulled by both inescapable atomic magnetism

and repulsion. In Mr. Robot, Price, the embodiment of homo economicus, but also

fascism, is kept in check by F Society/Dark Army’s hack, one that threatens to take

down global capitalism. Sitting his Trump tower with his German nationalistic map

behind him, Price invokes the eugenic logics of Nazi Germany and US white

296

nationalism. And, so does the actual doctor of Dr. Strangelove—the film that F

Society’s End of the World Party poster is based. In the film, Doctor Strangelove is

called upon by the US president to explain the impending zero day of “the Doomsday

Machine.” The doctor, who has an uncontrollable tick that forces him to involuntarily

enact what appears to be a Nazi-solute, suggests that for humanity to avert nuclear

holocaust, able-bodied American citizens, along with male military and political

leaders, should migrate underground with young women to breed a master race.

The doctor’s ticking, along with the Doomsday Machine of which he utilizes

to justify eugenic desire, stands in allegorically for a clock, one both real and

symbolic at once. The Doomsday Clock was founded by University of Chicago

scientists (who had developed the first atomic weapons of the Manhattan Project).

After creating the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in 1947, the scientists fabricated a

nonmechanical ticking machine to warn of impending nuclear apocalypse. To

countdown impending planetary doom due to nuclear threats and heightened

US/USSR tensions, the minute-hand was set to seven-minutes-until-

midnight/Doomsday. Since then, the position of the hand is annually evaluated by the

Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. The shortest countdown was recorded in the

height of the Cold War in 1984. Much to Bulletin readers’ reliefs, the Doomsday

Clock was reset in 1991 after the Cold War ended and US/Russia nuclear arsenal

budgets were cut. Miraculous, the world was then 17-minutes-until-midnight. But

then, the minute marker began moving towards doomsday once more. At first this

was due to ongoing nuclear threats, this time not only between the US and Russia.

Fourteen minutes, nine minutes, seven, five, six, and five minutes again. And

297

then, something shifted. In 2015, the Doomsday Clock returned to its 1984 position of

three-minutes-until-midnight. This was due not only due to nuclear threats; climate

change and anthropecenic disaster where also now being taken into consideration.

The next year, the Bulletin described “advances in biotechnology, in artificial

intelligence, and the cyber realm” to also be a factor (Mecklin 2017). In other words,

temporal analysis of the post-Cold War end-of-time must also take into consideration

the digital, which has now achieved a level of apocalyptic power on par with that of

the Cold War nuclear. Barad offers:

Doomsday Clock time doesn’t simply progress on its own, moving forward

without fail, and it isn’t synchronized to one particular physical phenomenon,

but rather to global politics and technological progress. A nonlinear device

that is reset once each year, the Doomsday device clocks sociopolitical,

technoscientific events, and its measure is marked by the distance from the

endpoint – midnight, the apocalypse – rather than some origin point. Time is

synchronised to a future of No Future (2017, 58).

Thus, in the “post-atomic age,” present time is holding its breath for the

apocalypse-to-come, still wired into Masco’s post-Cold War utopian-apocalyptic

circuit board. Future No Future.

In Dr. Strangelove, the greatest tension transpires when viewers learn that the

future will either be one in which no one survives, or in which only the white master

race does. While the apocalyptic motions are put into place by the materialization of

298

the Cold War inimical, in the end, possibilities for survival still hinge on Nazi

fantasies. Today, in the era in which the hack has replaced the bomb in liberal

imaginaries, and in which, at the same time, white supremacist movements grow at

alarming rates, rather than remain stuck in atomic time and its many hacked

rearrangements, perhaps it makes more sense to hack time itself. Doing so might

illuminate that in postsocialist/post-Cold War/postliberal/post-atomic times, perhaps

the greatest threat remains one that predates the Cold War—fascism.

What might it mean to find the enemy in fascism and its various endurances

rather than in anti-capitalist imaginaries? After all, cybersecurity threats rendered by

anti-capitalist hacking collectives, while positioned against the presumed globalizing

futurity of capitalism, are not imparting planetary Doomsday. The doom that they

impart may disrupt corporate practices, but not all humanity. Yet the growing power

of neoliberal Man, consolidated into Trump towers and inspired by older eugenic

histories yet threatened by anti-capitalists and antifascists alike, endeavors the doom

of all not absorbable into the white master race. On a material level, the hack is not

the bomb as it does not attempt to wipe out entire populations. White supremacy and

techno-imperialism, on the other hand, does. Thus, the question becomes, how, in

addition to fighting fascism as socialists and antifascists have long been doing, can

we also hack the liberalism undergirding zombie socialism that reads socialism as

threat? How can we hack Cold War atomic time so that we cease scrambling inimical

formations within it, and instead consolidate efforts against those who strive to

eliminate entire populations—a problem that socialism endeavored to solve? By

merely fixating on that which threatens to destroy capitalism and US imperialism,

299

liberalism aligns itself with fascist goals, masking white supremacist threat with the

anti-capitalist hacker.

In 1942-Nazi Germany, an intellectual resistance group known as the White

Rose formed out of the University of Munich, led by students and professors. Printing

thousands of leaflets and engaging in graffiti campaigns, members of the White Rose

sought to inspire local resistance to growing Nazism. The students had been subjected

to German youth movements growing up, to what activist Inge Scholl described as

“the closed ranks of marching youth with banners waving, eyes fixed straight ahead,

keeping time to drumbeat and song” (Scholl 1993). It was this temporal march of

fascism and eugenics that the students diverted from, instead devising an antifascist

struggle. Several of the core activists were medical students, having had been

conscripted to serve time in the Wehrmacht medical corps on the Eastern Front,

where they witnessed the horrors of anti-Semitic persecution. This led them to

develop anti-Nazi politics and an imperative to act. In 1942, the White Rose produced

four leaflet editions, which they hid in telephone books and public phone booths and

mailed for distribution (Wittenstein 1997). They produced a fifth in 1943, utilizing a

hand-operated duplicating machine to produce 6,000 to 9,000 copies, which were

carried to numerous German cities, appealing to Germans to resist “national socialist

subhumanism,” and imperialism “for all time” (White Rose 1943). Although the

members of the White Rose were eventually caught, tortured, and killed, their

aspirations to hack a fascist and violent system has lived on, with antifascist

movements today inspired by early antifascist organizing in the heart of Nazi

Germany.

300

Can learning from the White Rose of fascism’s mid-20th century zenith help

us to stop scrambling the inimical to realize that white supremacy has long been the

apocalyptic threat, from the first colonial projects and ghettos onwards? The

Trumpocalypse does not invoke new substantial formations, but perhaps instead

reflects a speeding up of fascist time. If liberalism simply relies upon remixing Cold

War era enemies, hacking people rather than time, it merely twists allegorical

structures that fail to articulate the real threat. If, as the hacker Whiterose speculates,

there are simultaneous realities playing themselves out, rather than detaining these

possibilities within an all-consuming logic by recycling the Cold War inimical,

perhaps we are better served by studying the concurrent continuities and

discontinuities as they reaffirm a heterogeneity of futures past, constituting alternative

futures to-come.

In the words of Barad, “In these troubling times, the urgency to trouble time,

to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive

conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable and the past as something

that has passed and is no longer with us is something so tangible, so visceral, that it

can be felt in our individual and collective bodies” (2017, 57). Hacking time is one of

many ways to respond to the urgency of troubling time. To hack time can mean

dislodging liberal progress narratives that conflate socialism with illiberalism, and to

instead pivot attention to materiality of fascist specters conjured anew in postliberal

times. Hacking time can also decenter liberal accounts of postsocialist technological

illiberalism. When read through a post-Cold War ethnographic lens, postsocialist

hacking worlds appear as responsive to post-1989 techno-imperialism and

301

Orientalism rather than as vampiric threats to all of humanity. Yet liberal portrayals

of illiberal hackers liken people such as Vlad, Viorel, and Guccifer as potential

harbingers of doomsday. Yet in reality, they only threaten the longevity of techno-

imperialism and its liberal logics, meanwhile pointing to other technological futures

illegible to Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, techno-imperialism and the racial

technocapitalism upon which it relies consolidates pre-socialist imaginaries, updating

fascist anew. In this way, by rendering the illiberal hacker as the threat to liberal

democracy, technofascism is able to grow unhindered. But this pre-socialist update is

only visible by hacking Cold War 2.0 circuit boards and dislodging its circular logics.

In both the liberal case against Russia, now saturating US geopolitical

imaginaries, and in the fictive world of Mr. Robot and the concurrent struggles to

hack techno-imperialism—there is a deep need to hack time. By hacking Cold War

temporality, the teleological logics of homo oeconomicus explode into nothingness,

surpassing the allegorical strategies of zombie socialism and the dialectics of the

vampiric. Instead what surfaces is new entanglements of techno-imperialism, racial

technocapitalism, and technofascism—all updated Cold War versions of pre-socialist

violence. But hacking these updates will only result in a runtime error unless attention

is placed upon the very constitution of Cold War ghosts as they have been coded to

replicate with each tick of the atomic clock, subsumed by the circular logics of the

utopian-apocalyptic circuit board.

302

Chapter 6. Non-Alignment in Outer Space: From the Ruins of Postsocialist Astrofuturism

“Before 1989, there were two visions about the possible end of the co-existing

histories of communism and capitalism which could not possibly fit into the same

world. One imagined a global deflagration, a post-apocalyptical world of Mad Max.

The other focused on the conquest on space, which was a third neutral space where

the two great superpowers and peoples could finally find peace. And maybe an ideal

mode of co-existing. Twenty-eight years later, in places like this one here, of these

two contemporary visions, memory retains only the apocalyptical vision. Yet it is

very difficult to grasp, in what ruins are we here? What ruins are these? The ruins of

which civilization? Of which historical period?”

These words spoken in Romanian by Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, a philosopher of

postsocialist decolonization, reverberate throughout the halls of what was once a

socialist youth center in Chişinău, Moldova. Dark pink glass from now shattered

windows, along with the deep forest green pines peaking in from outside, create a rich

palette in an otherwise abandoned concrete building. As part of a video-based media

piece by Romanian artists Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Gagarin’s Tree,

Țichindeleanu’s words and slowly-panned footage of the former youth center weave

together the ruins of two futures past, that of socialism and that of transition. Today,

they are materially crumbling together in the former youth center named after the

Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first human being who set foot into outer space.

Once adorned with rainbowed mosaics dedicated to cosmological visions, the

building is now a pile of broken cement and echoes. As Țichindeleanu suggests, not

303

only is the current state of ruination reflective of the material and imaginative

destruction imposed by postsocialist transition, but also the destruction of the first

wave of transition—itself now an aftermath in a new and more advanced phase of

postsocialism. During that first wave, “the apocalyptic future from the Mad Max

movies became the actual present in most of the neighborhoods and industrial cities

from the former socialist bloc. The ruins that we are seeing here are not only the ruins

of the communist dream. The signboard was put on the frontispiece of this building

during the postcommunist transition, which was also the moment when the Gagarin

Center was destroyed, when a new order and other forces became dominant and left

their names on the building.” But even this first wave of transition could not last or

sustain itself, and now lies in the wreckage of postsocialist disaster capitalism.

As many friends in Romania and Moldova have articulated of early post-

1989/91 transition, the promises of Western liberalism were just mirages and

mimicry; there was no infrastructure established in which the newly imposed

consumerist culture could sustainably grow. This era is exemplified, for instance, in

David Schwartz’s theater play, ’90, which weaves together stories of these false

promises of the era, such as “anticommunist ‘moral purity,’ entrepreneurial

enthusiasm and disappointment. . . illusions of freedom . . . the closure of mines in Jiu

valley . . . the legal restitution of houses once taken by communists to the more

‘correct’ people . . . the degradation of the lives of workers and state employees . . .

lives played at caritas [the Ponzi scheme that took over Romanian lives between 1992

and 1994 before going bankrupt and that led to US $450 million in debt], CAR [Casă

de Ajutor Reciproc, the mutual aid assistance program of the socialist era that served

304

as a type of non-bank financial institution that lost its power with socialism’s

collapse], pawnshops” (Miciu 2017). This era, crafted by empty promises and a

certain genre of capitalist dreams, now is also mapped by rumbles and sarcasm.

I first wandered upon Vătămanu and Tudor’s piece, Gagarin’s Tree, in a 2016

exhibit in the Future Museum, an open platform catering towards uncharted futures

and theories, organized in Bucharest’s Czech Center. The film engages themes of

socialist space exploration, and socialist imaginaries in a postsocialist moment framed

by protagonist Țichindeleanu as one of liberal colonization. Țichindeleanu is able to

sort through ghostly messianisms in order to think through spatiotemporal

“elsewhere” from the palimpsestic deserted space of the youth center. Glass tiles

falling off a mosaic by Aurel David, featuring a socialist figure ploughing the

universe, drop into Țichindeleanu’s hand as he caresses a future past. As he

nostalgically describes of the moment in which the mosaic was crafted: “An entirely

different history of the world was about to be written. The feeling and the memory of

this divergence is still active and alive, and it is awakened in connection with those

utopias that actually became daily life and are now the history of the people who

grew up in the tradition of real socialism. But if the post-communist transition meant

a colonisation, and if real socialism was partially an attempt to write a history

divergent from that of Western modernity, then what is left of that, what is alive?”

What do we make of a moment in which “the peaceful conquest of the future,” one

more aligned with Marxist humanism that capitalist spatial accumulation, was

destroyed?

By colonization, here Țichindeleanu aligns himself with other decolonial

305

scholars of postsocialism who understand transition to not simply be metaphoric, but

also material, installing new institutions, technologies, dreamworlds, and

understandings of time and space (Boatcă 2006; Rodríguez, Boatcă, and Costa 2016;

Țichindeleanu 2017; Tlostanova 2017). Indeed, the former youth center, once an

experiment in communist social production, has been dramatically altered. The center

had opened in 1972, built by money earned by Komsomol members on days of

volunteer-based unpaid labor following the October Revolution, known as subbotniks

and voskresniks. Its first stone was laid by Gagarin himself, who resided in in

Chişinău in October 1966, when he also famously toured a local wine cellar,

promising to fill it will metals from the moon (Nastja 2017; Stevens 2017). The

center, an autonomous space of sorts, held a hall for political and cultural that could

seat 800 people, a concert hall that could hold 400, a café-bar, a restaurant, and rooms

for sports, meetings, and youth arts collectives. Its library archived 12,000 books.

Everything was affordable for everyone, apparently, until the building was

privatized following the collapse of socialism. It then became the “MALS” disco-

tech, housing concerts and fashion shows until 2000, when the ownership changed

again. Since then, it has sat idle, weathering Moldova’s cold winters and hot summers

alike. “Today, even the signboard placed in the 1990s is a ruin. And this is the ruin of

the postcommunist transition of a second historical time, which is usually bypassed

when we try to understand the collective past that made us what we are,”

Țichindeleanu serenely offers.

The setting of Gagarin’s Tree fits well within the ambit of what Ann Stoler

describes “imperial debris,” the subsisting remains of protracted imperial processes

306

saturating “the subsoil of people’s lives” (2008, 192). In this case, it postsocialist

neo/liberalism that decolonial scholars understand as an imperial form, one that

evasively endures, vitally binding people to pasts and presences. Its various

technologies might be understood a facet Western techno-imperialism, or the modes

through which Western technology and technological imaginaries devour people’s

intimate lives and even outer space imaginaries alike, nested within what Jodi Kim

describes as the protracted imperial afterlives of the Cold War (2010, 4). Occupying

multiple historical tenses, Silicon Valley imperial effects refigure uncertain futures

and the conditional subjunctive, swallowing up, destroying, and abandoning

unrecognizable technofutures past. Yet, as Stoler suggests, there is a useful analytic

tension between the figurative effects of ruination and the violence of decay. “Making

connections where they are hard to trace is not designed to settle scores but rather to

recognize that these are unfinished histories,” she writes, “not of victimized pasts but

consequential histories that open to differential futures” (2008, 195). While many

today might sit in socialist ruins and construct anticommunist narratives focused upon

state socialism’s violences, Țichindeleanu, in the ruins, offers a romantic reading.

Refusing to be victimized by it, he hopes that by recovering socialist futures past, a

way out of post-Cold War neoliberal violence might be imagined.

While today, imperial debris is often considered a remnant of Western

coloniality in the former Third World, what if we were to think of the Cold War

tripartite separation of worlds as an active ruin in and of itself? As Shu-mei Shih

suggests, “postsocialism ought to be considered as a condition affecting the entire

world” (2012, 28). What if, then, we think of imperial ruins in post-Cold War

307

frameworks, as Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery suggest (2009), while also

thinking decolonization through an aligned (rather than unaligned) geopolitical

purview? Projects of decolonization and nonalignment might then be read as

nonaligned with the “first world,” but aligned with other second and third worlds

spaces, now the Global East and South. If these non/alignments were in part

organized in response to Cold War geographies, how might we also read, in the words

of Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder, “the complexity of our postcolonial present as

simultaneously configured by Cold War imaginaries and aftermaths” (2018, 21)? Or,

how might we consider the vitality of Cold War and socialist ruination as informative

of the project of contemporary decolonization? This framing might help pivot away

from a more rehearsed move in postsocialist decolonial theory that seeks to borrow

Latin Americanist decolonial scholarship and Wallersteinian world systems analysis

in order to frame the coloniality of postsocialist transition (cf. Gagyi 2016; Kalnačs

2016; Tlostanova 2012; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009). Rather, decoloniality can be

understood as deeply enfolded within socialist and postsocialist imaginaries. In this

way, the project of decolonization can be mapped within spaces of vital socialist

ruination.

Reading from socialist ruins and their endurance, here I assess new modes of

decolonizing the future. But also, I question why socialist astrofuturist and utopian

projects were ruined to begin with. In particular, I am interested in the actuarial power

of speculation. Speculation, as constitutive of astrofuturist imaginaries but also

finance capital and techno-imperialism, bears multiple genealogies. In her brilliant

project of decolonizing speculation, Aimee Bahng critiques, “The financial

308

colonization of the future builds on preexisting disparities of wealth held over from

earlier histories of empire and neocolonial enterprises that break at the fault line of

what has been the Global North and South” (2017, 5). As she suggests, those outside

of Europe have long been left in the waiting room of the future. Yet, what would it

mean to read the very formation of the Global North and South as an effect of the

Cold War? And what would it mean to read the Cold War as a speculative future

project antithetical to that of state socialism, even if both bear post-Enlightenment

genealogies (Buck-Morss 2002)? Could decolonizing Global North/South

cartographies open new possibilities in which other speculative dreams and alliances

gain actuarial power? Bahng suggests, “Pursuing alternative technocultural origin

myths also means rejecting the progress narrative that Enlightenment thought

encourages” (ibid., 11).

While committed to alternative technocultural origin myths of the socialist

bloc, in this chapter, I also suggest that socialist astrofuturism’s ruination is in part

due to the post-Enlightenment thought that it could never fully shake. While on one

hand, socialist utopianism was based upon friendships with other second and third

worlds peoples, as a project, state socialism never managed to fully resolve Eastern

Europe’s own internal racism. Through a close reading of “Gagarin’s Tree,” I

question, what might have happened if socialist astrofuturism could have learned

from the rich work of Afrofuturist speculation? How might this friendship have been

able to stymie the imperiality of racial technocapitalism, or the raciality that

technocapitalist futurity inheres? What might such counterfactual and speculative

historical alliances teach about decolonization in a particular postsocialist moment of

309

ruination?

Socialist Endurance

Gazing beyond the framing of the screen amidst the ruination portrayed in

“Gagarin’s Tree,” Țichindeleanu seems to see a future past not yet dead. Sitting there,

gently tugging at old mosaic stones now loose in the wall, is wearing the same black

leather jacket that he often does when I’ve spent time with him in person, in cities

such as Chişinău, Cluj, and Bucharest. For a couple of summers in a row, I’ve also

attended a decolonial camp that he co-organizes with other decolonial scholars and

rural cultural workers in the small Transylvanian village of Telciu. There, housing

justice activists, queer theorists, antiracist organizers, performance artists, and more,

have been gathering for several summers to think through futures past and present

unrecognizable to Western coloniality. Slowly, he is helping develop a new

consciousness amongst the left of the need to decolonize the future. Part of this, he

suggests, revolves around understanding the socialist past and its utopian visions of

antifascism and with nonaligned solidarity with other colonized peoples.

During my first summer in Telciu, in 2017 (when Schwartz also first debuted

‘90), Țichindeleanu took a small group of us into the county of Maramureș to visit the

ruins of a sculpture built by Géza Vida. Géza, an antifascist Romanian–Hungarian

sculptor, industrial worker, and communist militant, had “illegally” fought in the

Spanish French civil war while engaging in antifascist work in Romania. He then got

into socialist realism sculpting, mostly with support from the state (Bodea 1980). We

had travelled to Maramureș in order to view one of his outdoor sculptures,

310

“Monumentul Eroilor de la Moisei” (“The Hero’s Monument of Moses”), situated up

a hill and hidden away in the forest. The monument commemorates 29 Romanian

antifascists killed by Hungarian horthyşti fascists in 1944. After asking a number of

local villagers for the location, we eventually found the path to the sculpture, and

solemnly made our way to the forest clearing, as if we were reaching a sacred object,

or perhaps a space ship. The piece was originally designed as a soft of Stonehenge-

like circle made of twelve sessile oaks, each in the form of a god-like figure. It has

since been reconstructed with stone, with the giant figures circling a large basin of

water, aesthetically aligned with socialist modernist aesthetics. But also, the sculpture

enfolds pre-historical imaginaries with a sort of outer space ceremonial setting—

something akin to “indigenous” Dacian cosmology (without the nationalism) meets

antifascist outer space. While these stones aren’t ruins today, they are largely

forgotten, as is the rich history of socialist antifascists that helped engineer and

aestheticize state socialism.

Similarly, within the frame of “Gagarin’s Tree,” cosmological embellishments

decorate the youth center. This is the case with countless socialist-era buildings

constructed across the region, which often mix agricultural imagery with that of the

socialist worker and cosmonaut. Even the emblem of the former Communist Party

contained grains, trees, and industrial tower, and a sun. Today, many of these socialist

structures have changed meaning, symbolically but also in use value. I always laugh

when I come across the Crişul Shopping Center in Oradea, Romania, once a center of

socialist commerce. It opened in 1979, with flower-like cosmological figures

engravened into the columns of its concrete façade. Today, the building is home to a

311

number of new businesses and offices, mostly from the West. It also houses a

McDonalds, or “Mac,” which obscures the agro/astrofuturist with its red umbrellas

and banner, seemingly in obscene perversion. And yet, like many idiosyncratic spaces

of postsocialist transition, socialist imaginaries endure, peaking out beyond the

cheapness of McDonaldization. Etched into concrete, the flowers remain. In fact, the

juxtaposition, if anything, points to the obscenity of the West.

Or, take the numerous resorts erected along the Romania’s Black Sea coast,

largely all divided into towns named after planets, constellations, and astral wonders.

There had already been resorts along the coast before socialism, but they were largely

for the bourgeoise. This changed in the 1950s when the Communist Party

expropriated them. The idea was that every worker and their family deserved an

annual trip to the seaside and/or to the mountains. Former resorts transformed and

new ones were built, in towns that became known as Saturn, Neptun, Jupiter, Olimp

(Olympus), Luna, Uranus, and Cap Aurora (Aurora’s Head) were formed. Some of

the resorts shut down after socialism due to austerity, and to the erasure of guaranteed

vacations. Yet others still function. Sculptures of Neptune, Venus, and Saturn’s rings

are scattered throughout them, pointing to concrete futures past.

These futures are of a particular socialist agro/astro-imaginary. As

Țichindeleanu ruminates, “In Moldova, not even the dream of space conquest

managed to distance itself too much from notions of plowing and sowing.” Pointing

to the mosaic, he suggests that the ploughman’s territory was space, represented as a

rainbow, a common motif. A friend of mine, Zsuzsa, has showed me the piles

children’s books that her family still keeps in their home, filled with such imagery.

312

Țichindeleanu goes on, “The ploughman is thus directly connected to the land, but

also to space. However, the dream is not situated in a spaceship, or within a space

station from another planet – this new dream is about space itself, which is the

territory on which the ploughman writes its history.” The communist dream, he

suggests, was anchored by Gagarin’s cosmological journey. This was not because

Gagarin was able to enter space before the US, but rather, because he was able to

bring communist visions with him into it. There, legends say, he launched the project

of cultivating communist utopianism in order to bring it back to earth.

People surrounding the Gagarin’s Youth Center, during socialism and after,

took the project of cultivating communist utopia very seriously. This in part was

aligned with the project of Marxist humanism, the branch of Marx’s early thought

that theorized alienation. More popular in the former Yugoslavia than in socialist

Eastern Europe, which was more apt to engage in Marxist-Leninism and Stalinism,

Marxist humanism did manage to find its way to spaces such as Romania and

Moldova. There, it seeped with astral imaginaries. This is why, Țichindeleanu

suggests, there are spaceship sculptures in the now abandoned children’s playground

outside. But it is also why, throughout Chişinău, legends endure about “Gagarin’s

Tree.” This tree, either planted or seeded by Gagarin himself, was evidently the

offspring of an acorn flown into outer space on Gagarin’s mission. People in the city

have told me that there are many of these acorns that visited the cosmos, and that now

they’ve grown into tall oak trees throughout the former socialist world. While it’s true

that after returning from space, Yuri planted a tree near the Cosmonaut Hotel in

Baikonur, home of the Cosmodrome spaceport in southern Kazakhstan (that was then

313

the Soviet Union’s and that today is leased to Russia). The first satellite, Sputnik 1,

was launched from the Cosmodrome in 1957. A few years after, Yuri was propelled

into the galaxy. Since his return and his planting of the first “Gagarin Tree,”

cosmonauts have carried on the tradition of tree planting, mostly before their Soyuz

departures in the now “Cosmonaut Grove.” There, Gagarin’s first tree stands the

tallest (Kluger 2016).

While there, it is quite clear which is Gagarin’s tree, it is less clear where the

Chişinău version grows, where Gagarin also allegedly planted a tree during his

famous visit. As Țichindeleanu muses in the film, “Nobody knows exactly which tree

it is. There are multiple versions of it, depending upon who you ask.” This is true, and

rumors abound, even beyond Chişinău in other parts of Moldova. In the small village

of Păuleşti, in Călăraşi County, Alexander Filip claims to have planted one of the

acorns. But not everyone in the village believes this to be possible. Valery

Demidetsky has reported in the local news, “I don’t believe in the history of acorns

because of the conditions of the flight” (qtd. in Vladimirskaya 2018). For instance,

Gagarin’s flight having abandoned the emergency rescue systems at the start, the

ship’s soft landing, the removal of the duplicate brake installation, and other

restrictions. “I also cannot imagine that in the first flight, which lasted only 1 hour

and 48 minutes, that Gagarin managed to find time for fun with acorns,” she censures.

Indeed, Yuri’s Vostok 1 trip only completed one orbit around the earth, which he

described as fast and somewhat chaotic: “Everything was spinning. One moment I see

Africa—it happened over Africa—another the horizon, another the sky” (1961, 10).

While there were problems with his re-entry, he safely made it back into the

314

atmosphere and parachuted to earth, gently touching “the soft surface of freshly

plowed dirt in an open field not far from the town of Engels” (Zak 2019). Demidetsky

finds it absurd that he would have been able to recover acorns. “Yes, the experiments

with seeds and plants in space were set as part of long-term flights . . . There was

even a program in the USA in which tree seeds flown around the moon and then were

planted. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that this is how legends are born!” (qtd. in

Vladimirskaya 2018).

Legends are born, yet Mr. Filip is adamant that his nearly sixty-year-old oak

tree is beyond fiction. He planted it in a courtyard when he was employed by a local

school, he says. “I was then working as a school director, I went to the department of

education, and Mr. Timothy Chebrucha gave me a pot with a seedling. He brought it

from Moscow. They planted roses there on the 100th anniversary of Lenin, and then

they were given these acorns, which Gagarin had taken to space” (qtd. Noi 2018).

Everyone knows where Filip’s contested outer space tree grows, including the mayor

who sees it as a tourist attraction. But back in Chişinău, the location of Gagarin’s tree

remains a mystery.

Over half a century after Gagarin supposedly cultivated acorns with

cosmological utopian futures, they enchantedly grow on, enveloped in speculative

imaginings. In this way, socialist-era speculative futures can be read as vital, as still

entangling cosmological visions with life on earth. This shatters the widespread

fiction that socialism failed (cf. Ssorin-Chaikov 2016). Indeed, as Michał Murawski

suggests, the narrative of “socialism failed” has become an overdetermined,

“ingrained discursive form” (2018, 908). Amongst the ruins of Gagarin’s Youth

315

Center, birds melodically chirp outside, perhaps unaware of any failure. The Center,

the trees, and the spaceship in the playground are, after all, still there. And the

privatization that came after, the transforming of the complex into a disco-tech, was

only short-lived. Géza Vida’s cosmological stones still stand tall back in Romania,

reaching towards outer space, surrounded by old oak trees. And so, whose ruins are

these? As Murawski suggests, “One hundred years after the 1917 October

Revolution, in an era of unprecedented urban privation and inequality, we may, in

fact, have a lot of to learn from the still-existing achievements and enduring legacies

of built socialism” (2018, 910). Many of these exist within ethereal spaces of

speculation and dreamworlds. For scholars of postsocialism to step beyond normative

and recursive Cold War narratives mobilized around the liberal democracy’s victory

and socialism’s failures, scholarship ought to be, Murawski suggests, “driven by the

emic imperative to understand state socialist (or still-socialist) cities (or societies) on

their own terms” (ibid., 912). This arguably needs to occur in the level of speculation

as well.

Chimeras

Chimeras are biological phenomena in which single organisms are composed

of cells with distinct genotypes. Chimeras can result from a number of factors,

including an unborn twin sibling’s cells having fused and living on in one’s body, or

the grafting of one plant onto another. Chimeras have been the makings of legends for

millennia, described by Homer in The Iliad as a monstrous immortal hybrid roaming

Lycia in Asia Minor (Lattimore 1951). Ancient Dacians too had chimeras in

316

Romania, the now nationalist symbol of Dracian Draco, a dragon-dog with several

metal tongues. While not interested in the mythical or biological chimeras here, I am

curious if state socialism and liberal democracy might be read as chimerical inverses

of post-Enlightenment modernity. In particular, I am curious what this might tell us

about divergent and entangled (or not) astrofuturisms.

Susan Buck-Morss argues that during the Cold War, both the US notion of

unlimited individual freedom and the Soviet dream of a classless community shared a

genealogy of post-Enlightenment Western modernity (2002). Vasile Ernu, in writing

of growing up in the Soviet Union, recalls the ways in which the two systems were

dependent upon each other to be the dialectic enemy, while also maintaining strange

simultaneous affinities for the other (2006). This chimerical entanglement has been

well-mapped in the realm of astrofuturism and speculation.

Even before the Cold War, desire for contact led to the transposing of science

fiction across antipodal divides. Translators Cyrillicized Western science fiction

works by Edward Bellamy, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells (who also wrote of chimeras in

his The Island of Doctor Moreau), and more (Buck-Morss 2002, 45). These Western

fictions narrated growing fascinations with Anglo-American outer space colonization.

As critical race studies and postcolonial studies scholars have noted, as of 1893, the

West had been conquered, and so new space was need to saturate colonial thirst. De

Witt Douglas Kilgore writes, US “Astrofuturism posits the space frontier as a site of

renewal, a place where we can resolve the domestic and global battles that have

paralyzed our progress on earth” (2003, 2). In this way, it “mirrors and codifies the

tensions that characterized America’s dream of its future” (ibid., 2). The Manifest

317

Destiny of California had been obtained; what new futures might exist beyond?

Colonial science fiction blossomed in the 1950s as the Cold War began, with

some writers leading more towards the neocolonial, and others more critical of the

dangers of imperial expansion. Meanwhile, the space race saturated US political and

cultural imaginaries, with Alan Shepard reading the cosmos shortly after Gagarin.

Then came the US’s Apollo missions to the moon. Today, these moon trips are being

looked back upon nostalgically in the US as the Trump administration prepares to

fund the US space program like it hasn’t been since the Cold War, in part to protect

US spatial and technological superiority from growing competition with China. As

has been noted, outer space has become a US vulnerability, as so much of its

infrastructure relies upon satellites and GPS (Bachman and Titten 2019).

Leading up to state socialism on what would become the other side of the Iron

Curtain, outer space also captured imaginations. Some of this was no doubt

influenced by the West, but not all. Airplanes and bombers were named after Russian

fairytale characters, and writers such as Aleksandr Bogdanov anticipated a Marxist

Communist society on Mars. Nikolai Fedorov imagined a “moral universe

transformed through social-utopian applications of science (cloud-seeding, solar heat,

travel by electromagnetic energy” (Buck-Morss 2002, 45). Imaginaries such as these

bore material futures. For instance, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, the founding scientist of

Soviet rocketry, was one of Fedorov’s greatest fans. Artist Vladimir Tatlin claimed

that “events of 1917 in the social field were already brought about in our art in 1914,

when material, volume, and construction were laid as its basis” (qtd. in Chilvers

2017). Some of this material was more whimsical than other texts. Some was more

318

Marxist-Leninist, and some more enwrapped in anarchism and Marxist humanism

alike.

For instance, in 1921, the anarchist-socialist Romanian Iuliu Neagu-

Negulescu scribed his utopian Arimania sau Țara Buneiînțelegeri (Arimania, Land of

the Goodwill) while in prison in Brăila. He had been working to organize trade

unions, but with little success, and had been imprisoned by the new Communists. In

Arimania, Neagu-Negulescu imagines a future in which property is socialized based

upon cooperative models, and in which air, water, earth, and sun are worshipped as

public spaces. No one can work for more than five hours a day, and everyone receives

a month-long vacation. This is especially important for Arimanians, who love nature

and who only use sustainable energy. Patriarchy does not exist in this sex-positive

feminist society, nor does the bourgeois family, as people are supported by

community. Children learn in communal schools, and he in particular recommends

cinema as a technology of education. While Neagu-Negulescu was less popular than

other speculative futurists of the time, his imaginary does reflect a growing anti-

capitalist planetary sentiment that was embraced by the socialist futurists, even

though the early Communist Party was not his biggest fan.

Indeed, astrofuturism and speculative utopianism came to play a large part of

technological imagining throughout state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern

bloc. Several years after Gagarin’s cosmological trip in 1961, the Romanian Adrian

Rogoz wrote his science fiction Omul și Năluca (The Man and the Phantasm), which

depicted a society of human-plants growing on Venus. A visitor to the planet falls in

love with one of these chimeras, and then goes about creating a fanciful new tongue

319

in order to communicate, to connect beyond terrestrial borders of human/non-human.

Other texts abounded throughout the country, depicting various utopias and boundary

crossings in outer space. Ion Cârje wrote Irene sau Planeta cea mai Apropiata (Irene

or the Nearest Planet) about a social utopia in space, and Gheorghe Săsărman scribed

his Cuadratura Cercului (Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony) about

twenty-seven urban utopias organized around a metaphysical axis.

It was during the time that these plant-planet fantasies were being crafted that

autonomous theoretical debates in the Eastern bloc began problematizing intensive

growth—a Communist Party ideal. An idea began to circulate that the most

developed socialist countries (Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, the German

Democratic Republic, Hungary, and Poland) had reached certain limits of human and

natural exploitation, and that it might be impossible to reach the cosmological year of

2000 if the current course was maintained (Țichindeleanu 2017). People began

looking to development strategies in Third World spaces as possible ways out. In

1977, East German philosopher, Rudolf Bahro, proposed an alternative to state

socialism, which would embrace a “cultural revolution” that would merge the

socialist idea of social justice with indigenous visions that understood connections

with nature. In 1975, Francisc Păcurariu introduced the term “cosmovision” into

Romanian literature, inspired by Latin-Americanist cosmologies and understandings

of social justice.

In the Soviet Union, perhaps this eco/extraterrestrial speculative connection

came to full expression in Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous 1972 film Solaris. Based upon

Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel, the film rotates around an interstellar journey to an old

320

science space station in order to study the fictive planet, Solaris. The planet, much to

the surprise of the cosmonauts, exudes consciousness, and an ability to read the mind

of the orbiting humans. The planet can somehow materialize their grief and loss, so

much so that the cosmonauts come to believe that the planet is smarter than they are.

The film’s last frame features a small houseplant that a cosmonaut had transported

from Earth into space. Somehow, the plant can communicate with the planet in a way

that the cosmonauts never could, causing Solaris’s gaseous materials to mutate into

earthlike substances and colors. As Alaina Lemon writes, “Some viewers interpret

these last scenes as occurring within the protagonist’s broken mind; others see real

planetary changes imperfectly catalyzed by human memories of home. But what if it

is the plant who finally establishes a channel with the planetary mind?” (2018, x).

Lemon notes that unlike a lot of other science fiction of the era that emerged

as a late-imperial genre, texts that warned of the dangerous alien other, this little

houseplant offers alternative visions. These are of cross-border and posthumanist

friendships, relationships that “sprout and thrive across borders, but that look like

untidy weeds to the paranoid perspective” (ibid., xi). She suggests that Cold War

imaginaries that speculate upon the danger of contact with others bear 19th-century

imperial and xenophobic genealogies. Amidst the post-World War II pressures to

dismantle colonial orders, the US and the USSR each continued to build imperial

infrastructures, extending prisons and military practices into new terrains, shaping a

carceral and bordered planet. How might the fusing of plants and planets in outer

space point to certain utopian visions of decolonizing this imperial history and its

Cold War accumulations? If plants and planets could become chimeras to the other,

321

what else was possible?

This is not to deny that despite these utopic extraterrestrial visions of inter-

terrestrial connection, both Cold War superpowers concocted laboratories of

paranoia. Enemies were cast, as Lemon suggests, “alternatively as manufacturers of

ideological robots or as slaves to suspicion and superstition” (2018, xvii). Yet, these

paranoias were differently crafted. It might be, Lemon suggests, that American

paranoia blossomed over imagined blind spots, while Russian phobias were

transfixed upon details. This differentially led each superpower to heavily invest in

“technologies for intuition,” which included channeling information from the other

side and even engaging in paranormal techniques, for instance astral projection (ibid.,

2). While Lemon’s project is far more concerned about the nuances of such contact

and communication between the two worlds, here I am specifically interested in how

and why outer space imaginaries evolved on both sides of the former Iron Curtain,

and what their astral speculations index of socialist and postsocialist materialities.

How could carrying acorns and houseplants into outer space help intuit contact and

break free of imperial repetitions?

As tension and paranoia came to a head within the Cold War US,

Afrofuturistic speculative fiction began to offer other ideas, speculating upon spatial

futures beyond those of imperiality. These futures, fashioned by speculative

Afrofuturists such as Octavia Butler, open up paths for theorizing racial

technocapitalism, but also emancipatory futures in and with space. The cosmos

emerged as a place in which the violence of anti-Blackness could be unpacked, but

also in which antiracist possibilities could be cultivated. Alondra Nelson defines

322

Afrofuturism as African American narratives of “culture, technology, and things to

come” (2002, 9). Building upon this, Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones have

set to task describing Astro-Blackness, or “an Afrofuturistic concept in which a

person’s black state of consciousness, released from the confining and crippling slave

or colonial mentality, becomes aware of the multitude and varied possibilities and

probabilities within the universe” (2016, vii). Astro-Blackness, they suggest,

understands space and global technocultural assemblages as ripe for the emergence of

Black identity.

While Afrofuturist critique has assessed the racial violence of Cold War

colonial science fiction, and while postsocialist and Cold War studies have explored

many of the differences between US and Soviet outer space programs, here I follow

Țichindeleanu’s line of decolonial inquiry in assessing socialist astrofuturism. While

he agrees with Buck-Morss that both state socialism and democratic liberalism were

chimerical inverses of each other throughout the Cold War, each bearing the same

root of post-Enlightenment modernism (2016), he also points to differences between

state socialist astrofuturist imaginaries and those of its Western counterpart. This, he

suggests throughout the film, has everything to do with communist visions of

collectivity, which socialist speculative futurists imagined as being at its most utopian

in outer space. While this merged with Western colonial imaginaries, it nevertheless

produced something new.

Unlike their Cold War colonial counterparts, socialist astrofuturists sat on the

edge of the future, imagining that, as Țichindeleanu puts it, “an entirely different

history of the world was about to be written.” This divergence and its revolutionary

323

potentials, he suggests, is still active and alive, particularly amongst those who grew

up in the tradition of real socialism. After all, it became etched into daily life, even

into concrete. As Stephen Collier notes, what was remarkable during this time was

not the state’s ability “to create ‘ideal cities of the future’ but its utterly pathological

inability to do anything else” (2011, 112). This utopic project projected speculative

futurist imaginaries into youth centers and mosaics. In material form, these endure

after socialism’s putative death, into the era in which the post-Cold War US continues

to protract its imperial ambitions into the farthest reaches of space. Today, former

utopian relics are now being grown over with plants, some of which may be, as in

Solaris, still teleporting socialist visions into outer space. Whether we seem them as

annoying weeds or as Gagarin’s Tree, chimerically growing on in the wake of the

Cold War space race 2.0, is entirely up to us. But the question nevertheless remains,

what can speculative futures past tell us about why are these dreams are now in ruin?

Non/alignment

Reflecting upon its paradoxes, Țichindeleanu muses that the socialist space

dream “was actually a sort of engine that brought together the most different

commitments, from the dream of an ecological communism to that of the most

aberrant industrialization.” Today, what lives on is the “power of that dream to bring

people together and to create another history. This history remains to be written.”

During socialism, he reminds us, a notion of multiculturalism arose within Romania

and Moldova quite different from that of the Western world. While Western

multiculturalism of the time, what Jodi Melamed has described as racial liberalism

324

and neoliberal multiculturalism (2011), uses difference in order to further capitalism’s

scope, the socialist concept of prietenia între popoare (friendship amongst the

peoples) was dissimilar. In other words, through neoliberalism, multiculturalism and

racial liberalism grew in particular directions in the West; multiculturalism developed

much differently in socialist contexts.

In 1957, for instance, the Romanian internationalist magazine Orizonturi

(Horizons), edited by philosopher Mihai Şora, collaborated with the Présence

Africaine magazine to publish articles and poems by founders of Negritude. The

Senegalese historian of African pre-colonial culture, Cheikh Anta Diop, was featured

in particular. Much of the text revolved around themes of militant resistance for Third

World liberation. Romania was not alone in these early socialist friendships. The

Soviet bloc had begun hosting South African dissidents as early as 1951. As James

Mark and Quinn Slobodian proffer of the era, “Both the Iron Curtain and the borders

of the Black Atlantic were more porous than often assumed, offering contact zones

for interconnection between the Eastern Bloc and the Global South” (2018, 15).

Chişinău’s Casa Naţionalităţilor (House of Nationalities), which also briefly

enters the frame in “Gagarin’s Tree,” once was dedicated to struggles against slavery

and its aftermaths in other countries, Țichindeleanu remembers. For instance,

independence struggles in Angola and Mozambique were supported by Eastern

Europe (Popescu 2014, 91-109). In 2007, when Romania entered the EU, the country

by default left the United Nations “Group of 77” of non-aligned developing countries,

Țichindeleanu bemoans. These were “neither aligned with the Western order, Anglo-

Franco-German-American, nor to the Soviet order. A sort of descendent of the

325

Bandung Conference of the late 1950s. A friendship amongst peoples was the concept

that framed most of the efforts identified as efforts for world peace.” In fact, when

Romania joined the G-77 nations in 1976, it unexpectedly went as far, under the

leadership of Ceaușescu, to declare itself a Latin American nation, defying normative

geopolitical boundaries (Mark and Slobodian 2018, 6). Yet today, nearly thirty years

into postsocialism, there is no building nor institution that defends regional

interests—only spaces of alliance mediated by imperial powers. As Florin Poenaru

writes, the West has become “the norm par excellence, the only path to follow, the

East being on the verge of starting a ‘new (blank) page’ of its history” (2010). The

Western civilizing mission enforced a tabula rasa, with all friendships before

“inevitably perverted or unusable.” Anticommunism filled and created this void,

along with new forms of nationalism and a galaxy of “liberal colonial enlargement”

(Țichindeleanu 2017). Not only were future past alliances delated, but even alliances

between other Eastern bloc spaces were stifled. But how did this come to be?

Unbeknownst to many, the very term “decolonization” was first utilized in the

English language in the 1930s in order to prefigure the independence already

achieved in Eastern Europe for that which might be gained in Africa and Asia (Ward

2016, 237-240). It was during this time that Western imperial leaders analogized

Eastern European geographies with those of other colonized places, a trend that had

been building since the Enlightenment and its various instantiations of internal

Orientalism (Todorova 1997; Wolff 1994). For instance, in the late 1930s, the British

considered offering Nazis authority over Central African territory in exchange for

curbing their imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe (Pedersen 2015 343–345).

326

Nevertheless, the Communists that came to power after Second World War rarely

used the word, as they saw it as too Western and paternalistic (Mark and Apor 2016,

853). Instead, the language of “common struggle” was favored, a struggle that would

unite the so-called Second and Third World struggles, from Accra to Havana, from

Hanoi to Bucharest (Gildea et al. 2011; Mark and Slobodian 2018, 2).

Despite the early intentions of the Communists to censure Western

imperialism, many organizers from Third World struggles were wary of forming

alliances with Eastern Europe, and for good reason. During the Paris Conference of

1919, for instance, Czechoslovakian politicians had lobbied for land in West Africa

and Kamchatka (Mark and Slobodian 2018, 4). Leaders of popular Polish Maritime

and Colonial League also argued for colonies, claiming that it was their European

right, much to the admonishment of Nigerian soon-to-be president, Nnamdi Azikiwe

(Pulchalski 2017). But then, after fascism began to grow across Europe, things slowly

shifted. Trinidadian anti-colonial political force, George Padmore, censured

Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, offering alliance (Mark and Slobodian 2018,

4). Soon, so did anticolonial intellectuals such as Cyril Briggs, Jawaharlal Nehru, and

Rabindranath Tagore, all of whom supported the sovereignty of Eastern European

nations (Minkah 2011, 38; Nehru 1948, 273-274). Meanwhile, as Communist

governments came to power in the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, socialist

economists became excited about the expansion of socialism into the Third World,

reifying a Marxist teleological approach to futurity (Engerman 2013, 232).

Nevertheless, many in the Third World continued to be suspicious of the

Soviet Union as replicating Western imperial models, a fear that drove the Sino-

327

Soviet split in the 1960s. As Chari and Verdery have asked, “What, if not

accumulation by dispossession, were the nationalization and collectivizations the

Soviets imposed on their satellites?” (2009, 14). While many have critiqued Soviet

imperialism (Grant 1995; Hirsch 2005; Martin 2001; Slezkine 1994), it is important

to remember that not all Eastern European socialist spaces were even. Yugoslavia,

which had broken from Moscow in 1948, was also accorded a special position in

imaginaries of international solidarity, and it soon became one of the main architects

of the Non-Aligned Movement (Byrne 2015, 923–927; Niebuhr 2011, 146–179). This

is not to flatten the differences between the purported second and third worlds. As

Mark and Slobodian write, analogies between postcolonial and postsocialist

experiences (as well as socialist and colonials experiences for that matter), have

“often distorted as much as they revealed” (2018, 3). Yet also, in the words of

Nikolay Karkov and Zhivka Valiavicharska, “the political and economic

developments in postsocialist Eastern Europe from the last nearly thirty years—the

unchallenged privatization of public infrastructure, the rise or escalation of neo-

fascism, nationalism, and ethnophobia, and the re-entrenchment of patriarchal

relations—should also be seen in light of the decline of the anti-capitalist, anti-

colonial, feminist, antiracist politics that the socialist countries helped forge in the

global sphere during the twentieth century” (2018, 19-20). State socialism was, after

all, an incoherent and contradictory spatiotemporality “fractured by the universalist,

colonial, and ethnocentric paradigms of hegemonic humanism and the evolutionary

developmentalism of socialist frameworks of modernization, social progress, and

liberation” (ibid., 21). This history casts a complex specter on today’s understandings

328

of socialism, refusing monolithic narratives.

Romania was not as assertive as Yugoslavia in its distancing from the Soviet

Union, but it did reject the Comecon trade agreement, which had mandated that each

socialist state maintain an economic specialty. Romania had been slated to be

agrarian due to its longstanding peasant culture. But Gheorghiu-Dej’s Communist

Party, transfixed with Marxist-Leninist understandings of Communist futurity,

wanted to develop industry and technology, which it did. Romania adopted a firmer

anti-Soviet position in 1968, the same year that Tito enacted his final split from

Moscow. It also became a special ally to China, exchanging architectural idea,

technology, and even computers. Meanwhile, Romania demonstrated solidarity with

the anticolonial and liberation struggles in African nations such as Angola, Zambia,

Mozambique, Ethiopia, Capo Verde, and Burkina Faso, while also actively

supporting the abolition of Apartheid (Țichindeleanu 2017). Peripherally involved in

Middle East peace processes, particularly in Libya, Romania maintained strong ties

with Syria and other Middle Eastern countries as well. But these international

solidarities have been forgotten, Țichindeleanu laments in “Gagarin’s Tree.” What

would have happened if Romanians could have learned from the violence of the

World Bank, the IMF, and Structural Adjustment Programs in 1970s and 1980s West

Africa? What might have happened if, armored with this knowledge, there could have

been more resistance to the same policies as they were unleashed in Eastern Europe in

the 1990s? What then might have materialized of socialist astrofuturisms?

A good friend’s parents, Radu and Gigi, had both been engineers during

socialism in Timișoara. Radu, now unemployed and depressed as his job was

329

effectively eliminated after 1989 and his future thwarted, loves to regale me in stories

of socialist-era internationalism. He himself comes from Serbian heritage, as many

people do in the West, closer to the Serbian border. One morning, sitting at their

kitchen table while he was attempting to get me drunk on țuică (brandy) before

breakfast, he decided to tell me the story of “the lion.” It was in the early 1980s, and

he and a bunch of fellow engineer students were on assignment in the city. They were

an international bunch, as Romania was a top university destination for many

engineers in the Third World. One of them was from the Congo. It had been a warm

summer evening, and they were all sitting around playing cards, with the window

slightly ajar. Suddenly, their comrade from the Congo jumped up, yelling that he had

just heard a lion outside. Radu laughed at the man, as did everyone else there, “as we

don’t have lions in Romania.” And yet, the Congolese friend was unrelenting. “He

said that he grew up with lions, and he knows a lion when he hears a lion,” my

friend’s father, Radu, continued. They all shut the window and went on with their

card game, laughing at their international friend. Then, the next morning, when they

turned on the radio, the Romanians were shocked. A lion had indeed escaped from a

local zoo and had been roaming the city over night. “We thought we knew about all

the cats in this city, but it turns out we didn’t know a thing!” he exclaims. As Radu

was cracking himself up, Gigi entered the kitchen, laughing at him, to tell me that

they are still in touch with some of their former classmates from African countries. A

friend from Burkina Faso will be visiting them soon for a big class reunion, she notes.

“I wonder how it was for them, back then, here. There aren’t as many people from

Africa in town these days, just tourists really. Maybe still a few students, here and

330

there,” she ponders.

Gigi and Radu blame the Romanian Communist Party (and the Soviets, in the

case of Moldova), as well as Western imperialism, for the crumbling of this past

“friendship amongst the peoples.” Indeed, the Romanian Communist Party became

increasingly isolationist and authoritarian, as has been well critiqued and as is now

the dominant memory of state socialism in and beyond Romania. During this latter

part of state socialism, Romania pursued extractivist politics, despite ongoing

influences from Third World friends. Perhaps, Gigi ponders, the problem was the

socialist embracing of the Marxist-Leninist teleological narrative. This codified

progress within the terms of post-Enlightenment modernity. Such a temporal vision

pathologized local “indigenous” understandings of time within Romania, but also the

temporalities of other Indigenous and colonized peoples across the globe.

In addition, despite its policies of housing nationalization, public education,

guaranteed work, and even guaranteed vacations, the Communist Party never really

addressed ongoing anti-Roma racism. Nor was Romania’s brutal history of anti-

Semitism adequately tackled, as many have told me. Also, during this time, African

students in Eastern Europe, many of whom had grown accustomed to freedom of

debate and ideas in African countries, found Soviet-style socialism stifling. For

instance, in 1963, between 350 and 500 African students fled Bulgaria after finding

East European disregard for pan-Africanism (Slobodian 2018, 654). Some saw the

Soviet project as too similar to the Western one. As a Nigerian student explained in

Moscow, “Africans did not wish to replace western imperialism with eastern

imperialism, no matter how well camouflaged it might be with seeming sympathy for

331

African nationalism” (qtd. in Kret 2013, 248).

Of course, antiracist and antifascist organizing contoured early socialist

organizing in Romania and beyond. Many of the early socialists were Jewish, for

instance Ana Pauker, a Stalinist, and the world’s first female foreign minister, who

served Romania in the 1940s and 50s. But Pauker was scapegoated by Gheorghiu-Dej

as early as 1952 in the name of de-Stalinization in a move that many consider anti-

Semitic and sexist (Levy 2001). After Stalin’s 1953 death, new socialist imaginaries

began to take hold across Eastern Europe, for instance Marxist Humanism. Yet in

Romania, the 1970s, there was a strange return to Marxist-Leninism, what some

called neo-Stalinism (Verdery 1991). This began with the 1971 Tezele din iulie (July

Theses), issued by Ceaușescu in the name of “social humanism.” While the Theses

were inspired by Ceaușescu’s visit to the People's Republic of China, North Korea,

North Vietnam, and Mongolia, they resulted in increased authoritarianism rather than

transnational friendship. Yet opposition to Soviet acquiescence was sustained, which

allowed a positive position in the eyes of those critical of Soviet imperialism. After

1989, across the former Eastern bloc, the idea of friendship amongst the people was

effectively displaced by NATO and EU understandings of alliance.

Although Marxist-Leninism and Marxist humanism were the dominant

discourses in socialist Eastern Europe throughout socialism, it seems that there is a

need to make space for more nuanced and contradictory understandings of these

philosophies. Karkov and Valiavicharska suggest that these nuances point to how,

even within socialist Eastern Europe, the Marxist humanist project of Enlightenment

led to a stark elision of the project’s “constitutive ‘dark underside’” (2018, 18). Thus,

332

“by the time of the collapse of the state socialist governments (and even a little

earlier), the internalization of the logic of imperial difference and its epigonal

aspiration to true Europeanness” would incite internal racial violence (ibid., 18).

Despite its liberatory potentials, they suggest, Marxist humanism never fully freed

itself form colonial grounds. It remained too entangled with its chimerical other.

Yet Shu-mei Shih suggests that perhaps another kind of Marxist humanism

could have “offered the possibility of conjoining the two terms socialism and

humanism productively into a compound term, with consequences for both

postsocialism and posthumanism” (2012, 31). This branch of thought would link with

Fanon’s “new humanism,” which critiques Enlightenment humanism’s complicity

with racial and colonial violence. Had this form of humanism, one since taken up by

Sylvia Wynter, been sustained, it could have, she submits, offered a viable alternative

to “totalitarian socialism” and the “neoliberal humanism” that has wreaked havoc

across both sides of the former Iron Curtain. This form of humanism would accord

that posthumanist outer space imaginaries cannot be obtained if not all people are

considered human. Put otherwise, posthumanism and its astral imaginaries are only

liberatory if grounded in antiracist, antifascist, and decolonial struggles. In sum, “our

current displacement of postsocialism and relegation of posthumanism to cybernetics,

as well as the apparent disjunction between postsocialism and posthumanism, indicate

the elision of a global history of Marxist humanism since the 1950s that has cut

across the first, second, and third worlds” (ibid., 30). Might outer space imaginaries

have been more fruitful amongst the socialists if “friendship amongst the peoples”

was stronger, and if antiracism had been better battled within socialist countries?

333

What might have happened if, instead of embracing post-Enlightenment

temporal narratives during state socialism (Western liberalism’s chimerical other),

another timeline was constructed altogether? Instead of speculating a way out through

industrialization alone, what if local cosmologies grounded in difference were fused

into astral future-making? Perhaps this is some of what Gagarin’s acorn, Solaris’s

houseplants, and before that, the world of Arimania, had hinted it. This

trans/posthuman friendship between local cosmologies and outer space utopias,

between plants, planets, and humans might have been able to code more revolutionary

friendship amongst the peoples than those fashioned by the Communist Party. While

intrigued by these possibilities, most of all, I am curious as to what kinds of

counterfactual histories might be written in which socialist astrofuturists might have

been inspired not by their chimerical other, but rather by Afrofuturists also trying to

imagine a way out from the confines of racial technocapitalism and its

transnationality. What kinds of speculative worlds might have opened up in which the

raciality of capitalism could be deconstructed and dismantled within both sides of

post-Enlightenment modernity?

Mapping Futures

During my first visit to Telciu, to Țichindeleanu’s decolonial summer camp, I

came across a workshop that two friends were leading with village youth. For two

months, Lolo and Silvana had been working with local youth to collect stories, which

would eventually be geolocated and released on an app that decolonial summer

school participants could use to better understand the village. “App Telciul Copilor

334

(The App of the Telciu Children)” was used to geolocate the multiple stories, and it

was made available to all of the village locals and summer school participants. While

many of us had trouble accessing it, as the 3G and 2G networks were spotty, a far

leap from the 4G highspeed internet of Romanian cities (Europe’s fastest), it

nevertheless attempted to render a techno-future illegible to Romania’s newfound

Silicon Valley status. There was the story of an eleven-year-old boy who regularly

makes his way to an orchard to contemplate the meaning of life. We all visited his

favorite fruit trees to hear the story in its referenced location, although he wasn’t there

as he was working in the fields that day. There were stories of the local cemetery, a

forgotten river, and other local mysteries.

Lolo later told me that not all of the sites and stories that the youth recorded

were embedded within the map, as some decided that they didn’t want tourists or

outsiders going near their favorite places. Now, two years later, they’re thinking of

taking everything offline, as they don’t want the narratives accessible to outsiders at

all. During the process of recording and mapping their stories, the youth buried letters

in the ground near the sites of their stories to their future selves. This is more

important, Lolo explained over beers one freezing, winter night back in Cluj, in an

abandoned synagogue and current cultural center, Tranzit. Maybe maps were a bad

idea to begin with, Lolo muses. They are, after all, he suggests, the ultimate colonial

tool. Global Positioning System (GPS) is a Cold War military technology, derived

from the US Navy’s NAVSTAR technology. As Ruth Oldenziel studies, during the

Cold War, the US colonized new islands in order to set up GPS satellite nodes across

the world, mostly on islands, to extend its imperiality. “Again and again, these large

335

Cold War technical networks were grounded in colonized islands in an era of

decolonization,” she writes (2015, 29).

How does one, amongst socialist, postsocialist, and even, as in the case of the

synagogue that Lolo and I are sitting it, pre-socialist ruins—spaces all made ruins

through the entangled deployment of techno-imperialism and racial

technocapitalism—map new technologies for the future? How can one theorize

technological, speculative, and cartographic justice as a field of inquiry amongst such

a complex and contradictory history of technological, speculative, and cartographic

injustice? What archives can be read from the space of ruins, and what archives can

still be crafted? Elizabeth Povinelli, writing of a GPS augmented reality mapping app

that she and colleagues have been constructing in Australia in order to create a

postcolonial digital archive. Rather than simply digitize and map for the sake of

making existing information digitally representable, the postcolonial digital archive

should, she suggests, “create new forms of storage and preservation and new archival

spaces of time, in which a social otherwise can endure and thus change existing social

formations of power” (2016, 150). Further, a postcolonial digital archive has to

grapple with new questions of digital access, mediating who does and does not have

access to intimate stories and cartographies contained within an online space—similar

predicaments to those emergent from the App Telciul Copilor. In addition, she

suggests that this postcolonial digital archive has to contend with the materiality of

the not-so-rare earth comprising the hardware used to access, much of which has been

mined and produced in ways that directly dispossess the mapping community. As she

questions, how can one create new technologies and applications from this cramped

336

space in ways that refuse absorption back into the “enormous smelter” of capitalism

(2015, 167).

While Povinelli is concerned with crafting a postcolonial digital archive, here

I question what a decolonial postsocialist digital archive might be. How could it look

to socialist technofutures past and present, meanwhile recognizing some of the past’s

failures, particularly when it comes to race? While the smelters of Western techno-

imperialism and racial technocapitalism can surely be blamed for astrofuturist ruins,

perhaps it is too easy to blame the West alone. Perhaps a connected rather than

comparative approach to theorizing astrofuturism, racial technocapitalism, and

techno-imperialism across both sides of the former Iron Curtain can help map past

violence, but in order to clear the way for new genres of “friendship”—ones in which

antiracist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist futures can be cultivated together, whether in

outer space or not.

337

Epilogue: Blackface on the Nightshift, Proptech AI, and the Posthuman Landlord

I had been to “The Office” in Cluj before. Formerly a textiles factory, the new

shiny glass building on Bulevardul 21 Decembrie 1989 was erected in 2012. Now,

replete with numerous tech companies, fancy restaurants, banks, and cafes, it is hard

to imagine what the space might have been like in its former socialist iteration. I had

attended a couple of tech meetups and corporate hackathons there over the years,

hoping to gain some insight into the workings of this new Siliconized moment in

Cluj. However, it wasn’t until meeting up with an old friend in Cluj that I became

aware of one of the offices in “The Office” that now I can’t stop thinking about.

My friend Caro had recently moved back to Cluj to be closer to her family,

while in the midst of finishing her own dissertation on feminist labor histories in

Romania’s interwar period. Struggling to pay her expenses, she had managed to land

a job in a call center in The Office. There, she began working for Invitation Homes,

the US’s largest landlord and a subsidiary of the half-a-trillion-dollar multinational

company, the Blackstone Group. It was in the midst of the subprime foreclosure crisis

of 2008 that Blackstone began to acquire single-family homes for cheap prices in the

US, Spain, and numerous other countries, profiting from the racial technocapitalism

that designed and implemented the mortgage crisis (Chakravartty and Silva 2012).

Invitation Homes was launched by Blackstone in 2012 to serve as their “rental

wing.” In 2017, several Wall Street landlords, including Colony Starwood Homes and

Waypoint merged with Invitation Homes, the latter suddenly tasked with managing

82,000 single-family homes. Colony had been owned by California Billionaire, and

338

close associate with Donald Trump, Thomas Barrack, whose company is notorious

for evictions and poor tenant conditions (Glantz 2017). After a 2017 initial public

offering (IPO), the Invitation Homes began trading on the New York Stock

Exchange, accumulating wealth by the millisecond. The company’s evictions also

occur across the clock, often with the assistance of automated platforms and artificial

intelligence (AI). Welcome to the age of the automatic Wall Street landlord.

Caro had no intention of working for Invitation Homes, and really just needed

a nightshift job in which she could make enough to pay her living expenses.

Invitation Homes, she explained over coffee on her day off, maintains two call

centers—one in Dallas, Texas, and one here in Cluj. She works in the sales and

billing department, in a building adjacent to but not nearly as fancy as the Invitation

Homes offices of The Office. They could at least have good lighting as it’s the night

shift, she complains. Her shift begins at 5:30pm. It ends at 2am. It’s not so bad, but it

does “mess her up a bit.” Others have to start later and work all night, which would

be worse. She has Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, which enables her to have “less of a

life” and therefore more time to write. She only found the job because she had friend

working there. There was a “bring your buddy to work day” that she attended, and

she was offered the job that day. The only requirement was English fluency. Unlike

other tech jobs in the city, Caro doesn’t see much middle-class aspirational

technoculture at the call center. “Lots of students just trying to get by,” she tells me.

The job is far from enjoyable though. Just the other day, a woman called from

California whose son was dying. The woman was tired of Invitation Homes denying

her Section 8 housing. Caro tried to sound compassionate to the caller, but the woman

339

saw through all of her boiler plate responses. Frustrated, the caller hung up,

muttering, “Have a nice life—my son is dying!” “It’s hard to just smile and go on to

the next call after things like that,” Caro sighed. Other people profile Caro and her

colleagues for their Eastern European accents. Callers have no idea that they’re

dialing someone in Romania until they hear the accents. “They really have no idea

that their home is even owned by Invitation Homes,” she explained. Normally all that

they’re aware of is that there’s a property management company, and that they have

to call it to find a rental, or to order certain repairs. But they have no idea who the

landlord is.

The job is frustrating, but what aggravates Caro most is the racism of some of

her coworkers. “We get calls from people trying to get Section 8 housing in

California,” she began. “This one guy, he racially profiles the callers, and if someone

is calling because they need certain repairs done, he decides that they’re unworthy

and doesn’t log the complaint. So, they get no service.” Yet another coworker

performs Blackface when he profiles a caller as Black, and he chooses a “Black-

sounding” name for himself, just to have fun, she recounts, lividly. “And what’s

bizarre, is that we’re just supposed to be robots for this bigger company that is built

upon racial violence in the US!” she exclaims. Yet through new routes of racial

technocapitalism and Silicon Valley imperialism alike, anti-Black racism in Invitation

Homes call center in Cluj is impacting tenant experiences back in California.

Technically, Caro doesn’t even work for Invitation Homes, at least not

officially. In another weird post-2008 subprime phenomenon, she is working for what

is considered a property technology company, Yardi System Incorporated. Invitation

340

Homes is one of Yardi’s top clients. “It’s all confusing,” she tells me. “I don’t know,

do I work for Invitation, for Yardi, for the clients? Maybe if Invitation Homes is

Yardi’s client, then I work for the clients of the client?” she rhetorically questions.

The “proptech” company, Yardi, was established in Santa Barbara in 1984 by

Anant Yardi, and has since expanded to manage properties for large Wall Street

landlords. Technically, it maintains over 5,000 employees working in thirty offices

across several continents, managing property managers and landlords. These clients

own single and multi-family housing, military housing, ports, condos, public housing,

and more, like Invitation Homes. Yardi also provides software for property

management, of which they have over 20,000 clients, largely businesses and

governments. Yardi Breeze is for smaller property managers, and Yardi Voyager for

larger ones, such as Invitation Homes. Yardi also offers online platforms to mediate

landlord-tenant relations, such as RENT Café and COMMERCIAL Café. They also

offer residential screening technologies so that landlords can profile prospective

tenants.

“Yardi Romania” is the Yardi’s third largest office worldwide. There, it

contracts with Invitation Homes, as well as PropertyShark, a real estate database used

by speculators across the US, which it purchased in 2010. It maintains space in The

Office for fancier IT related jobs. But the Call Center, or Center Point, is a bit down

the street, above Lidl Marăști. The call center opened in 2013, and as of 2017, there

were 480 employees working there. It had emerged as a laboratory experiment

alongside a call center in Irving, Texas. Yardi wanted to see which location was more

advantageous, and Cluj seems to have won. Today, they provide 24/7 support in

341

English and in Spanish. “We all know English from TV and school, and then most of

us know Spanish from the telenovelas we were glued to in the 90s,” Caro laughs.

They are all trained in “Basics of Telephone Etiquette,” and “Hold Procedures—

Putting the Customer on Hold the P.R.E.T.T.Y way.” Rolling her eyes, Caro pulls out

some papers in her backpack to prove that these trainings are real.

As one of Caro’s colleagues, Loredana, illuminated weeks later in an

interview, she and her fellow nightshift workers in the maintenance department have

become experts in US domestic culture. While she hasn’t observed racism in

maintenance, she does get frustrated often. She doesn’t understand how people in the

US could possible think that a broken clothing dryer or air conditioner is an

emergency. “Here in Romania, we don’t really have either of those things, dryers or

air conditioners, and when something does break, we just fix it ourselves.” But their

US clients find emergencies in everything. “They also have no idea when they’re

calling with one of these emergencies that they have a corporate landlord,” she

confirms. But this is the way that property works now—there’s no going back, she

thinks. People do often think that she’s a robot on the phone, which infuriates her to

no end. “I start talking, and then they start yelling commands and pressing buttons, as

if I’m a robot. If Yardi or Invitation Homes does get robots to replace us, well the

clients, they’ll be making complaints about that too!” Loredana is in the midst of

finishing her undergraduate degree in European Studies, and she doesn’t know what

she’ll do after graduating. She had been shy before working for Yardi/Invitation

Homes, and she appreciates that she’s gained better “people skills” through the job.

She thinks that she wants to become a police officer like her father, but she worries

342

that she’s too short. Maybe she’ll just stay at the call center, as long as she doesn’t

become replaced by a robot, she laughed as it began raining on us at an outdoor café.

The last several years have seen a proliferation of digital platforms and

proptech (also called “realtech”) companies reshaping multiple domains of urban life,

including the provision, consumption, and management of rental housing. These

platforms apply different forms of AI and machine learning in order to benefit

property owners, many of whom are now Wall Street entities. Proptech platforms

facilitate the management, consumption, and investment of particular properties, and

also regulates landlord and tenant relationships (Shaw 2018). By incorporating

artificial intelligence and machine-based learning, proptech targets tenants and

automates evictions, forming figures that Desiree Fields has termed the “automatic

landlord” (2019). This automated landlord is what might also be called a superhuman

landlord, a posthuman figure that embodies the knowledge of who should and should

not be living in particular housing, neighborhoods, and cities. Today, there are

platforms that allow landlords to evict tenants through “click notices,” and also

applications used to allow neighbors to “snitch” on other neighbors for what are

described as nuisances (McElroy and Werth 2019).

By obscuring human decision-making processes and calculi, proptech

automation and its superhuman landlord proliferates postracial imaginaries,

pretending that race does not matter in these calculations. However, as in the case of

other forms of AI, automation only recodes racism, with both “intelligence” and

racism transmitted from machine makers to AI materiality and usage (Atanasoski and

Vora 2019). This is not to deny the realness of digital worlds and futures, but it is to

343

find spaces of temporal entanglement between prior conceptions of the human and the

superhuman landlord of today. The human of the posthuman landlord, in other words,

is still human. This imaginatively posthuman owner/manager depends upon the

transiting of race and racism across the Silicon Curtain. Yet unlike the digital nomad,

the avatar of Silicon Valley imperialism, who lands in Romania and doubly

dispossesses Roma people materially and allegorically—this posthuman landlord

preys upon the lifeworlds and data of Section 8 tenants and renters within the heart of

Silicon Valley imperialism. Yet at the same time, the posthuman landlord drags US

renter data and futures into Romania, where new frictions transpire, indexed by

strange transits of anti-Black racism and anti-Eastern European racism alike. In the

Silicon Valley of Europe, this configuration sits upon the ruins of other technological

futures past—infrastructurally, epistemologically, and imaginatively.

Through postsocialist analytics and a connected approach to mapping

difference and entanglements, it becomes possible to begin understanding historic

forms of race and raciality now being updated in the artificial present. While it is

understood that histories of settler colonial histories and transatlantic slavery inform

contemporary understandings of property and land both in the US and in Romania,

postsocialist and connected approaches help illuminate what transpires when these

histories entangle with those of data colonialism and AI. After all, while both Silicon

Valley and Romania have long been sites of data accumulation, albeit of different

genres, questions remain as to what happens when these forms mix in to the

postsocialist moment. How does ownership of land and the ownership of data enfold

upon each other? How does this entanglement lead to a new form of postsocialist

344

double dispossession, one that continues to inflict violence and extraction upon the

lives that techno-imperialism and racial technocapitalism have always depended?

A connected rather than comparative approach brings these configurations

into visibility, foregrounding entanglements across space and time. Methodologically,

connected inquiry remains rooted in community organizing, and centers housing,

technological, and cartographic justice as fields of inquiry. Romanian cities are

neither the Silicon Valley, the most dangerous town on the internet, nor the little Paris

of the East. This is not to deny that older histories of comparativity are not deeply

woven into Romania’s materialities and dreamworlds; rather, it is to think beyond

modes of comparison and metaphor that delete spatiotemporal connections and the

politics of displacement. Moving forward, I hope that mapping these connections

across time and space help create new forms of international solidarity. Tracing these

nodes and routes can after all help in charting and organizing futures unrecognizable

to Silicon Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism alike. Today, this new

terrain of proptech AI, as it transits race, data, and dispossession across postsocialist

space, be one of many places in which this work of non-alignment might continue.

345

Bibliography

Abrudan, I. et al. “Developments in the Romanian Forestry and Its Linkages with

Other Sectors.” Notulae Botanicae Horti Agrobotanici 37:14-21.

Achim, Viorel. 2004. Roma in Romanian History. Budapest: Central European

University. Adams, Gordon. 1921. The Politics of Defense Contracting:

The Iron Triangle. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Aiello Daniella, et al. 2018. “Eviction Lab Misses the Mark.” Shelterforce,

22 August. Available at:

https://shelterforce.org/2018/08/22/evictionlab-misses-the-mark/.

Alberts, Gerard, and Ruth Oldenziel. 2014. Hacking Europe. London:

Springer London Limited.

Alexe, Anca. 2018. “3.4 Million Romanians Left the Country in the Last 10

Years; Second Highest Emigration Growth Rate after Syria.” Business

Review, February 26. Available a-in-the-last-10-years-second-highest-

emigration-rate-after-syria-159038.

America’s Voice. 2018. "Trump Hate Map." Available at:

https://americasvoice.org/trumphatemap.

Amrute, Sareeta. 2016. Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian It Workers in

Berlin. Durham: Duke University Press.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Growth and

Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

346

Anderson, Reynaldo and Charles Jones. 2015. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-

Blackness. New York: Lexington Books.

Anderson, Warwick. 2012. “Asia as Method in Science and Technology Studies.”

East Asian Science Technology and Society: An International Journal 6:4.

Anonymous. 2011. Desert: The Anarchist Library.

Anonymous. 2017. “The ‘Light Revolution’ In Romania: When Toppling the

Government Isn't Enough.” CrimethInc, March 9. Available at:

https://crimethinc.com/2017/03/09/the-light-revolution-in-romania-when-

toppling-the-government-isnt-enough;

Anonymous. 2018. “How Anti-Fascists Won the Battles of Berkeley in the Bay and

Beyond: A Play-by-Play Analysis.” CrimethInc, January 3. Available at:

https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/03/how-anti-fascists-won-the-battles-of-

berkeley-2017-in-the-bay-and-beyond-a-play-by-play-analysis.

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. 2016. "San Francisco for Sale: Loss of

Public Space." Available at:

https://www.antievictionmap.com/public-space.

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. La Frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza: San

Francisco: Aunt Lute.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural

Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7(2-3):295-310.

Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.

Arondekar, Anjali and Geeta Patel. 2016. "Area Impossible: Notes toward an

Introduction." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22(2):151-71.

347

Asavei, Maria Alina. 2019. “Artistic Memory and Roma Women’s History

Through an Intersectional Lens: The Giuvlipen Theater.” European

Journal of Women’s Studies. Available at:

https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506819846163.

Asbring, Elizabeth. 2018. “The Fascist Sympathizer Who Founded Ikea.” The

New York Times, January 29. Available at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/ingvar-kamprad-ikea-

fascist.html

AT Kearny, 2017. "The Widening Impact of Automation." Available at:

https://www.atkearney.com/documents/20152/793366/The+Widening+Impa

ct+of+A utomation.pdf.

ATT Tech Channel. 2015. "Interview with Author/Futurist Arthur C. Clarke, from

an AT&T-MIT Conference, 1976.” Available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1vQ_cB0f4w.

Atanasoski, Neda. 2013. Humanitarian Violence: The Us Deployment of Diversity.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Atanasoski, Neda and Erin McElroy. 2018. "Postsocialism and the Afterlives of

Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent." In Nicoletta Pireddu, ed.

Reframing Critical Literary, and Cultural Theories, 273-297. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. 2018. "Postsocialist Politics and

the Ends of Revolution." Social Identities 24(2):139-54.

348

Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race,

Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Atkinson, Rowland and Gary Bridge. The New Urban Colonialism:

Gentrification in a Global Context. London, UK: Routledge.

Augur, Tracey. 1948. "The Dispersal of Cities: A Feasible Program." The

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4(10):312-15.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 1974. "One Day, a Computer Will Fit on

a Desk." Available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTdWQAKzESA.

Ayres, Ron. 1983. "Arms Production as a Form of Import-Substituting

Industrialization: The Turkish Case." World Development 11(1):813-23.

Bachman, Justin and Travis Titten. 2019. "Why Trump Wants a Space Force for the

Final Frontier." Bloomberg Business Week, August 6. Available at: ht-trump-

really-start-one-quicktake

Backpack Me. 2017. "Best Places for Digital Nomads in Cluj.”

Available at: https://bkpk.me/best-places-for-digital-

nomads-in-cluj.

Bahng, Aimee. 2015. "Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic

Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification." Journal of Asian Studies

49(4):663-85.

Bahng, Aimee. 2017. Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial

Times. Durham: Duke University Press.

349

Bakic-Hayden, Milica. 1995. "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former

Yugoslavia." Slavic Review 54(4):917-31.

Baltac, Vasile. 2015. Lumea Digitală: Concepte Esențiale (The Digital World:

Essential Concepts). Bucharest: Editura Excel XXI Books.

Baltac, Vasile and Horia Gligor. 2014. “Some Key Aspects in the History of

Computing in Romania.” Paper presented at IT STAR WS History of

Computing Szeged, September 19. Available at:

https://slideplayer.com/slide/3896690/.

Ban, Cornell. 2016. Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barad, Karen. 2003. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of

How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture And

Society 28(3):801-831.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the

Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Barad, Karen. 2011. “The Matter of Comparisons, or Why Entanglements

Matter.” Comparative Tinkering Symposium, Anthropology Department,

University of California Santa Cruz, October 25.

Barad, Karen. 2015. "Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer

Political Imaginings." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

21(2-3):387-422.

350

Barad, Karen. 2017. "Troubling Time/S and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-

Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable." new formations:

a journal of culture/theory/politics 92:56-86.

Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1996. "The Californian Ideology."

Science as Culture 6(1):44-72.

Beckett, Andy. 2017. "Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the

Future We Live In." The Guardian, May 11. Available at: ht-philosophy-

predicted-the-future-we-live-in.

Beller, Jonathan. 2018. "Preface to the Revolution: Digital Specters of

Communism and the Expiration of Politics." Social Identities 24(2):238-54.

Benson, Micheala. 2015. "Class, Race, Privilege: Structuring the Lifestyle Migrant

Experience in Boquete, Panama." Journal of Latin American Geography

14(1):19-37.

Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of

Ideas. London: John Murray.

Bernt, Matthias. 2016. "Very Particular, or Rather Universal? Gentrification

through the Lenses of Ghertner and Lopez-Morales." City 20(4):637-

44.

Berry, David. 2004. The Romanian Mass Media and Cultural Development.

New York: Routledge.

Beyerle, Shaazka and Tina Olteanu. 2016. “How Romanian People Took on Power

and Corruption.” Foreign Policy, November 17. Available at:

351

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/17/how-romanian-people-power-took-

on-mining-and-corruption-rosia-montana/.

Bhan, Gautam. 2019. "Notes on a Southern Urban Practice." Environment and

Urbanization: DOI: 10.1177/0956247818815792.

Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. 2011. "How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become

Cybercrime Central." Wired, July 31. Available at: ht-hackerville-

romania/.

Black, Edwin. 2001. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi

Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Random

House.

Black, Edwin. 2003. “Eugenics and the Nazis: The California Connection.” San

Francisco Chronicle, November 9. Available at: ht-2549771.php.

Bledsoe, Adam and Willie Jamaal Wright. 2019. "The Anti-Blackness of Global

Capital." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37(1):8-26.

Boatcă, Manuela. 2006. "Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflecting

Eastern European and Latin American Experiences." Journal of World-

Systems Research 12(2):321-46.

Boatcă, Manuela. 2013. "Multiple Europes and the Politics of Difference

Within." Worlds &Knowledges Otherwise 3(3).

Bodea, Gheorghe I. 1980. Vida: Artist Militant. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia.

Bojin, Daniel, Paul Radu and Hans Strandberg. 2016. "Ikea's Forest Recall."

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting, March. Available at:

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/4990-ikea-s-forest-recall.

352

BondGraham, Darwin and Tim Redmond. 2014. "Investigation: New Condos

Aren't Owned by San Francisco Residents." 48 Hills, September 29.

Available at: https://48hills.org/2014/09/investigation-new-condos-arent-

owned-san-francisco-residents/.

Borcila, Andaluna. 2009. "Accessing the Trauma of Communism: Romanian

Women on Us Television News." European Journal of Cultural Studies

12(2):191-204.

Borrow, George. 1991. Lavengro: The Scholar-the Gypsy-the Priest. New York:

Dover.

Bowles, Nellie. 2019. "Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San

Francisco Alive." New York Times, March 7. Available at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/style/uber-ipo-san-francisco-

rich.html.

Brahinsky, Rachel. 2012. "The Making and Unmaking of Southeast San

Francisco." PhD diss., UC Berkeley.

Brainspotting. 2018, "IT Talent." Available a-talent-map/ (accessed 12 July 2018).

Breger, Claudia, Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt. 2014. "Understanding the

Other?" Pp. 131-45 in Role of the Romanies. Images and Counter Images

of 'Gypsies'/Romanies in European Cultures. Liverpool: Liverpool UP.

brown, adrienne marie and Walidah Imarisha. 2015. Octavia’s Brood:

Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK

Press.

353

Buck-Morss, Susan. 2002. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass

Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bucur, Maria. 2005. Eugenie și Modernizare În România Interbelic?

(Eugenics and Modernization in Interbellic Romania). Iași:

Polirom.

Burrows, Roger. 2018. "Urban Futures and the Dark Enlightenment: A Brief Guide

for the Perplexed." In Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas, eds. Towards a

Philosophy of the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives.

London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Butler, Judith. 2019. “The New Fascism of the Anti-Gender Ideology

Movement.” Paper presented at the “New Fascism Mass Psychology &

Financialization” conference at the New School, New York City.

Butler, Sarah. 2017. "Ikea Enters Gig Economy by Buying Freelance

Labour Firm Taskrabbit." in The Guardian, September 28. Available

at: ht-economy-tradespeople.

Byrd, Jodi. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Byrd, Jodi, Chandan Reddy, Alyosha Goldstein and Jodi Melamed. 2018.

"Predatory Valueeconomies of Dispossession and Disturbed

Relationalities." Social Text 36(2):135.

Byrne, Jeffrey James. 2015. "Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War:

Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment." The

International History Review 37(6):923-27.

354

Caldeira, T. P. R. 2016. "Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, Transversal

Logics, and Politics in Cities of the Global South." Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space 35(1):3-20.

Calhoun, C. 2002. "The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a

Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism." The South Atlantic

Quarterly 101(4):869-97.

California Reinvestment Coalition and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. 2018.

"Disrupting Displacement Financing in Oakland and Beyond." Available at:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52b7d7a6e4b0b3e376ac8ea2/t/5b1eb1

950e2e72

b49f5a1679/1528738430348/Disrupting+Displacement+Financing.pdf

Carr, Paul. 2012. "Travis Shrugged: The Creepy, Dangerous Ideology

Behind Silicon Valley's Cult of Disruption." Pando Daily, October

24. Available at: https://pando.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged.

Cavin, A. 2012. "The Borders of Citizenship: The Politics of Race and Metropolitan

Space in Silicon Valley." University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Chakravartty, Paula and Denise F. da Silva. 2012. "Accumulation, Dispossession,

and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism: An Introduction."

American Quarterly 64(3):361-85.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and

Historical Difference-New Edition. Princeton University Press.

Chan, Anita Say. 2013. Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and

the Myth of Digital Universalism. Cambridge: MIT Press.

355

Chari, Sharad and Katherine Verdery. 2009. "Thinking between the Posts:

Postcolonialism Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War."

Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(1):6-34.

Chayka, Kyle. 2018. "When You're a Digital Nomad, the World Is Your Office." in

The New York Times, February 8. Available at: ht-world-is-your-office.html

Chee, Foo Yun. 2016. “EU regulators to examine lawmakers' report on IKEA

taxes.” Reuters, February 15. Available at:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-ikea-taxavoidance-

idUSKCN0VO19C

Chelcea, Liviu. 2012. "Housing Question and the State-Socialist Answer: City,

Class and State Remaking in 1950s Bucharest." International Journal of

Urban and Regional Research 36(2):281-96.

Chelcea, Liviu. 2015. "Postindustrial Ecologies: Industrial Rubble, Nature and the

Limits of Representation." Parcours anthropologiques 10:185-200.

Chelcea, Liviu and et al. 2015. "Who Are the Gentrifiers and How Do They

Change Central City Neighbourhoods?: Privatization, Commodification,

and Gentrification in Bucharest." Geografie 120(2):113-33.

Chelcea, Liviu and Gergo Pulay. 2015. "Networked Infrastructures and the

'Local': Flows and Connectivity in a Postsocialist City." City 19(2-

3):344-55.

Chelcea, Liviu and Oana Druță. 2016. "Zombie Socialism and the Rise of

Neoliberalism in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe." Eurasian

Geography and Economics 57(4-5):521-44.

356

Chelcea, Liviu. 2017. "Gentrification and the Post-Socialist City." The

International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference,

Kyiv, Ukraine.

Chen, Kuan-hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Chilvers, Ian. 2009. "Tatlin, Vladimir." in The Oxford Dictionary of Art and

Artists: Oxford University Press.

Chung, Brian. 2011. "Exceptional Visions: Chineseness, Citizenship, and the

Architectures of Community in Silicon Valley." University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor, MI.

Chung, Brian. 2016. "Finding Happiness in the Chinese Suburban Technopolis:

White Supremacy in Silicon Valley California." Verge: Studies in Global

Asias 2(1):58-65.

Ciobanu, Claudia. 2015. "Roșia Montană: An Omen for the Ttip." EuroActiv.com.

Clapp, Alexander. 2017. "Romania Redivivus." New Left Review.

Clare, John. 1996. Poems of the Middle Period, 1822-1837. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Coalition, California Reinvestment and Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. 2018.

"Disrupting Displacement Financing in Oakland and Beyond." Available

at:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52b7d7a6e4b0b3e376ac8ea2/t/5b1e

b1950e2e72b49f5a1679/1528738430348/Disrupting+Displacement+Fina

ncing.pdf

357

Cocola-Gant, A. Tourism Gentrification. Northampton: Edward Elgar.

Cojocar, Adrian. 2011. "Cum S-a Reinventat Prin Investitii De 10 Mil. Euro Unul

Dintre Simbolurile Industriei Din Bucuresti, Uzina Timpuri Noi (As

Eeinvented by Investments of 10 million euros, One of the Symbols of the

Bucharest Industry, the Timpuri Noi Factory." ZF Companii, October 11.

Available at: ht-dintre-simbolurile-industriei-din-bucuresti-uzina-timpuri-

noi-8862631

Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2013. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of

Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Colinescu, Roxana. 2018. "Protestele Au Devenit Un Element Constant De

Contestare: Iterviu Cu Ruxandra Gubernat și Henry Rammelt." in

Dilema Vech2.

Collier, Stephen J. 2011. Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity,

Biopolitics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Colmeiro, Jose F. 2002. "Exorcising Exoticism: Carmen and the Construction of

Oriental Spain." Comparative Literature 52(4):127-44.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2012. “Theory from the South: Or, How

Europe is Evolving Toward Africa.” Anthropological Forum 22(2):113-

131.

Connolly, Kate. 2012. "Ikea Says Sorry to East German Political Prisoners Forced

to Make Its Furniture." The Guardian, November 16. Available at: ht-

Germany

358

Cooper, M. 1996. "Class War @ Silicon Valley: Disposable Workers in the New

Economy." The Nation.

Corburn, J. and R. Bhatia. 2007. "Health Impact Assessment in San Francisco:

Incorporating the Social Determinants of Health into Environmental

Planning." Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 50(3):323-

41.

Corporate Europe. 2017. "Gold-Digging with Investor-State Lawsuits.”

Available at: https://corporateeurope.org/en/international-

trade/2017/02/gold-digging-investor-state-lawsuits

Council of Europe. "Romania.” Available at:

https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/roma.

Crampton, Jeremy and Andrea Miller. 2017. "Algorithmic Governance."

Antipode, May 19. Available at:

https://antipodefoundation.org/2017/05/19/algorithmic-governance/

Crook, Jordan. 2014. "Alfred Club, Because Automatic Is Better Than on-

Demand." Tech Crunch, September 9. Available at:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/09/alfred-club-because-automatic-is-

better-than-on-demand/

Cucu, Sorin. 2017. "Paper Presented at Asa/P Meeting."

DeGroot, G. J. 1995. "The Limits of Moral Protest and Participatory

Democracy: The Vietnam Day Committee." Pacific Historical

Review 64(1):95-119.

359

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the New Work of

Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-

and Post-Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dishaw, Thomas. 2015. "Facebook's Person-Centric Biometric Database Is Bigger

Than the FBIs." Investment Watch Blog.

Dixon-Roman, Ezekiel. 2017. "Toward a Hauntology on Data: On the

Sociopolitical Forces of Data Assemblages." Research in Education

98(1):44-58.

Do, Youjin, 2017. One-Way Ticket: The Rise of the Digital Nomad.

Docaș, Catalin. 2015. "Ice Felix -O Afacere Extrem De Profitabil? Predat?

Intereselor Imobiliare (Ice Felix—A Profitable Business? Taught? Real

Estate Interests)." Digi24.

Dragomir, Elena. 2012. "The Formation of the Soviet Bloc's Council for Mutual

Economic Assistance: Romania's Involvement." Journal of Cold War

Studies 14(1):34-47.

Duncan, Ian. 1998. "Wild England: George Borrow's Nomadology." Victorian

Studies

1(3):381-403.

Dunn, Elizabeth. 2017. “Anthropology Matters: Engaging with the Work of

Katherine Verdery.” Paper presented at AAA conference, San Jose.

360

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2010. "Digital Labour, Species-Becoming and the

Global Worker." Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization

10(3):484-503.

Dzenovska, Dace, B. Anderson and M. Keith. 2014. "We Want to Hear from

You: How Informing Works in Liberal Democracy." Oxford:

Migration: A COMPAS Anthology: Compas.

Dzenovska, Dace and Larisa Kurtović. 2017. "The Future of Postsocialist

Critique." Paper presented at the American Association of

Anthropologists Soyuz Conference.

Dzenovska, Dace and Larisa Kurtović. 2018. "Lessons for Liberalism from the

‘Illiberal East.’" Cultural Anthropology. Available at:

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1422-lessons-forliberalism-from-the-

illiberal-east.

Engerman, David C. 2013. "Learning from the East: Soviet Experts and India in the

Era of Competitive Coexistence." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa

and the Middle East 33(2).

English-Lueck, J. A. 2002. Cultures@Silicon Valley. Stanford: Stanford University

Press. Ernu, Valise. 2006. Nascut in URSS (Born in USSR). Jassy: Polirom.

European Parliament. 2006. "Romania and Bulgaria All Set to Join the EU.

Eurostat. 2017. "Poverty and Social Exclusion.” Available at:

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statisticsexplained/index.php/Europe_2020_indi

cators_-_poverty_and_social_exclusion (accessed 4 February 2018).

361

Eurostat. 2018a. "At-Risk-of-Poverty Rate by Poverty Threshold Age and Sex –

EU-Silc Survey." Available at:

http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableAction.do.

Eurostat. 2018b. “IT Specialists in Employment.” Available at:

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-

explained/index.php/IT_specialists_in_employment.

Eurostat. 2018c, "Percentage of the IT Sector on GDP." Available at:

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-datasets/-/ISOC_BDE15AG

(accessed June 3, 2018).

Eviction Lab. 2019. "About." Available at: https://evictionlab.org (accessed 11

February 2019).

Fan, Fa-ti. 2007. “East Asian STS: Fox or Hedgehog?” East Asian Science,

Technology and Society 1: 243–47.

Farkas, Gh., Azzola B., Bocu M. 1963. “Dispozitiv de Introducere cu Tranzistori

(Transistor Input Device.” Sesiunea de Comunicări a Comisiei de

Automatizare a Academiei R.S.R. (Communication Session of the

Automation Board of Academy). Bucharest.

Fehervary, Krisztina. 2013. Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities

and the Middle Class in Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Feliks, Garcia. 2016. "Russia 'Tried to Help' Donald Trump Win the Election,

Cia Concludes." The Independent, December 11. Available at: ht-

hackers-us-election-2016-a7466926.html.

362

Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color

Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ferriss, Timothy. 2011. The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and

Join the New Rich. New York: Random House.

Fields, Desiree. 2019. “Automated landlord: Digital technologies and Post-Crisis

Financial Accumulation.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and

Space. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19846514.

Findlay, John M. 1992. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture

After 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fiscutean, Andrada. 2014a. "'Life Is Pretty Good Here for It People': Where

Techies Earn Five Times the Average Salary." Znet, November 26.

Available at: ht-earn-five-times-the-average-salary.

Fiscutean, Andrada. 2014b. “The Mix of Poverty and Piracy that Turned Romania

into Europe's Software Development Powerhouse.” Znet, August 28. ht-into-

europes-software-development-powerhouse.

Fiscutean, Andrada. 2015. "How Eastern Europe's Villains Changed Sides in the

Malware War -and Made You Protect Your PC." Znet, February 5.

Available at: ht-made-you-protect-your-computer/.

Fiscutean, Andrada. 2018. "The Adventures of Lab Ed011: Nobody Would

Be Able to Duplicate What Happened There." ArsTehnica, August 27.

Available at: https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/08/the-secret-

history-of-ed011-the-obscure-computer-lab-that-hacked-the-world/

363

Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of

Modernism: Harvard University Press.

Florea, Ioana and Kerstin Jacobsson. 2015. "The Ups and Downs of a Symbolic

City: The Architectural Heritage Protection Movement in Bucharest." Pp.

55-78 in Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe.

London: Routledge.

Florea, Ioana. 2016. "The Ups and Downs of a Symbolic City: The Architectural

Heritage Protection Movement in Bucharest." Urban Grassroots

Movements in Central and Eastern Europe:55-78.

Florea, Ioana, Mișa Dumitriu, F. Anders and A. Sedlmaier. 2017. "Living on the

Edge: The Ambiguities of Squatting and Urban Development in

Bucharest." Pp. 188-201 in Public Goods Versus Economic Interests

Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting. New York: Routledge.

Forbes. 2013. "Câți bani a cheltuit Roşia Montana Gold Corporation în publicitatea

din presa scrisă? (How Much Money the Gold Corporation Has Spent in the

Print Media Advertising?” Forbes.ro, February 9. Available at: ht-cheltuit-

rosia-montana-gold-corporation-in-publicitatea-din-presa-scrisa_0_8686-

10173.

Forman, Mark. 2017. “Fascism Is Possible Not in Spite of Liberal Capitalism, but

Because of It.” Truthout, April 15. Available at:

https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-

capitalism-but-because-of-it/

364

Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities and Queer Histories.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Friedman, Jeremy. 2015. Shadow Cold War and the Sino-Soviet Competition for

the Third World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. The End of History and the Last Man. New York:

Simon and Schuster.

Gagarin, Yuri. 1961. "Gagarina Ya. A. Ot 13 Aprelya 1961 Ha Zasedanii

Gosudarsvennoi Komissii Mosle Kosmicheskogo Poleta." Aero (1):10.

Gagyi, Agnes. 2016. "'Coloniality of Power' in East Central Europe: External

Penetration as Internal Force in Post-Socialist Hungarian Politics." Journal

of World-Systems Research 22(2):349-72.

Gannes, Liz. 2010. "Eric Schmidt: Welcome to the ‘Age of Augmented

Humanity’.” Gigaom, September 7. https://gigaom.com/2010/09/07/eric-

schmidt-welcome-to-the-age-of-augmented-humanity/.

Gentile, Michael. 2015. "The Post-Soviet Urban Poor and Where They Live:

Khrushchev-Era Blocks, 'Bad' Areas, and the Vertical Dimension in

Luhansk, Ukraine." Annals of the Association of American Geographers

105(3):583-603.

Ghertner, Asher. 2015. "Why Gentrification Theory Fails in 'Much of the World'."

City 19(4):552-63.

Ghilezan, Marius. 2013. "Genetica Protestelor Din Piata Universitii (The

Genetics of University Square Protests)." Evenimentul Zilei, March 17.

365

Available at: https://evz.ro/genetica-protestelor-din-piata-universitatii-

1057777.html.

Ghodsee, Kristen. 2016. Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century

Communism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gildea, Robert, Mark, James & Niek Pas. 2011. European Radicals and the

‘Third World’, Cultural and Social History, 8(4):449-471.

Gille, Zsuzsa. 2010. "Is There a Global Postsocialist Condition?". Global

Society 24(1):9-30.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2002. "Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes

on Racism and Geography." The Professional Geographer 54(1):15-24.

doi: 10.1111/0033-0124.00310.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson and Incite Women of Color Against Violence. 2009. "In the

Shadow of the Shadow State." Pp. 41-52 in The Revolution Will Not Be

Funded. Boston: South End Press.

Glantz, Aaron. 2017. "Profiting Off Pain: Trump Confidant Cashed in on Housing

Crisis." Reveal, June 8. Available at:

https://www.revealnews.org/article/profiting-off-pain-trump-confidant-

cashed-in-on-housing-crisis/

Godzich, Wlad. 2014. "Sekend-Hend Europe." boundary 2 41(1):1-15. Graham,

Steven and Simon Guy. 2002. "Digital Space Meets Urban Place:

Sociotechnologies of Urban Restructuring in Downtown San Francisco."

City 6(3):369-82.

366

Grant, Bruce. 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gray, R. 2017. "Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement." The Atlantic,

February 10. Available at: ht-internets-dark-anti-democracy-

movement/516243/.

Green, Matthew. 2016. "How Government Redlining Maps Pushed Segregation in

California Cities." KQED News, April 27. Available at:

https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/18486/redlining.

Greenhouse, Steven. 1990. "In Romania, Ceausescu Is Gone but His Crippling

Economic Legacy Endures." The New York Times, August 6. Available

at: ht-gone-but-his-crippling-economic-legacy.html.

Haider, Shuja. 2017. "The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial

Intelligence and Neoreaction." View Point Magazine, March 28. Available

at: ht-artificial-intelligence-and-neoreaction/.

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University

Press.

Hann, Chris. 2007. "A New Double Movement: Anthropological Perspectives on

Property in the Age of Neoliberalism." Socio-Economic Review 5:287-318.

Haraway, Donna. 1987. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and

Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." Australian Feminist Studies 2(4):1-

42.

Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman

_Meets_Oncomousetm. New York: Routledge.

367

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

Harkinson, Josh. 2017. "Meet Silicon Valley's Secretive Alt-Right

Followers." Mother Jones, March 10. Available at: ht-valley-tech-alt-

right-racism-misogyny/.

Hart, Gillian. 2006. "Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in

the Age of Resurgent Imperialism." Antipode 38(5):977-1004.

Hartman, Chester. 1984. Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community

Resistance in San Francisco. San Francisco, CA: Glide Publications.

Hartman, Chester. 2002. City for sale: The transformation of San Francisco.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2018. "The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a

Riotous Manner." South Atlantic Quarterly 117(3):465-90.

Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hayes, Matthew and Hila Zaban. Forthcoming. Transnational Gentrification.

Urban Studies.

Hayes, Matthew. 2014. "'We Gained a Lot over What We Would Have Had': The

Geographic Arbitrage of North American Lifestyle Migrants to Cuenca,

Ecuador." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(12):1953-71.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 2006. "Unfinished Work from Cyborg to

Cognisphere." Theory, Culture & Society 23(7/8):159-66. doi:

10.1177/0263276406069229.

368

Hecht, Gabrielle. 2011. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in

the Global Cold War. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Henderson, A. 2013, "Best Cities to Live as a Bootstrapping Young Entrepreneur."

Nomad Capitalist, December 1. Available a-best-cities-live-bootstrapping-

young-entrepreneur (accessed 5 February 2018).

Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the

Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Hochschild, Arlie R. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human

Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hong, Grace Kyungwon. 2012. "Existentially Surplus Women of Color Feminism

and the New Crises of Capitalism." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay

Studies 18(1):87-106.

Hong, Grace Kyungwon and Rodrick A. Ferguson. Strange Affinities: The

Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Durham:

Duke University Press.

Horvat, Srecko and Igor Štiks, eds. (2015). Welcome to the Desert of Post-

Socialism: Radical Politics After Yugoslavia. Verso Books.

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. 2019. About the Housing Justice in

#Unequalcities Network. Available at: -conference/.

Hughes, P. and G. Cosier. 2001. "What Makes a Revolution? Disruptive

Technology and Social Change." BT Technology Journal 19(4):24-28.

Iancu, Valentina. 2017. "Tell Them About Me." Revista Arta, June 17.

Available at: http://revistaarta.ro/en/tell-them-about-me/.

369

IndyBay. 2015, "SFBARF's Slideshow Reveals Their Divide-and-Conquer

Aspirations" IndyBay, October 21. Available at:

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/10/21/18779146.php.

International, Colliers. 2018. Romania: Research & Forecast Report.

Ioras, F. and I. V. Abrudan. 2006. "The Romanian Forestry Sector:

Privatisation Facts." International Forestry Review 8:361-67.

Jakić, Bruno. 2015. “Galaxy and the New Wave: Yugoslav Computer Culture in the

1980s.” 2014. In Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel eds. Hacking Europe,

107-128. London: Springer London Limited.

Jasanoff, Sheila and Sang-Hyun Kim. 2015. "Future Imperfect: Science,

Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity." Pp. 1-33 in Dreamscapes

of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jashnani, Gaurav Priscilla Bustamante and Brett G. Stoudt. 2017. "Dispossession

by Accumulation: The Impacts of Discretionary Arrests in New York

City." Race and Justice. doi: 10.1177/2153368717742476.

Kalnačs, Benedikts. 2016. 20th Century Baltic Drama: Postcolonial

Narratives and Decolonial Options. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag.

Kapadia, Ronak K. 2014. "Sonic Contagions: Bird Flu, Bandung, and

the Queer Cartographies of Mia." Journal of Popular Music

Studies 26(2-3):226-50.

370

Karkov, Nikolay R. and Zhivka Valiavicharska. 2018. "Rethinking East-European

Socialism: Notes toward an Anti-Capitalist Decolonial Methodology."

Interventions 20(6):785-813.

Kay, Daniel. 2015, "The Digital Nomad Deception" This Is Youth.

Available at: https://thisisyouth.org/2015/12/21/digital-

nomads-ethical-tourism.

Kelley, Robin D. G. 2016. "Trump Says Go Back, We Say Fight

Back." Boston Review. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2017. "What Did

Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?" Boston Review.

Kenarov, Dimeter. 2012. "Romania: Mountains of Gold." Pulitzer Center

on Crisis Reporting.

Kilgore, De Witt. 2003. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of

Utopia in Space.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kim, Jodi. 2015. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique of the Cold War.

Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism. New

York: Macmillan.

Kluger, Jeffrey. 2016. “Here's the Russian Ritual That Ensures a Safe Space

Flight.” Time, February 26. Available at:

http://time.com/4238910/gagarin-red-square-ritual.

Kovacs. 1991. “Implementing Robotics In ‘Classical’ Factories: A Difficult Task for

the East European Industries.” IEEE, 1942-44.

371

Koga, Yukiko. 2016. The Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political

Economy of Redemption After Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Kret, Abigail Judge. 2013. “‘We Unite with Knowledge’: The Peoples’ Friendship

University and Soviet Education for the Third World.” Comparative Studies

of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33(2):248.

Kroll, Andy. 2018. "Cloak and Data: The Real Story Behind Cambridge Analytica's

Rise and Fall." Mother Jones, May/June. Available at:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/cloak-and-data-cambridge-

analytica-robert-mercer.

Kurtović, Larisa and Nelli Sargsyan. 2019. "After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and

Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World." History and Anthropology

30(1):1-19. doi: 10.1080/02757206.2018.1530669.

Labov, Jessie C. The Contours of Legitimacy in Central Europe New

Approaches in Graduate Studies. 1988. "A Russian Encounter with the

Myth of Central Europe." European Studies Centre, St. Antony's

College, Lisbon conference.

Lancione, Michele. 2019. "Weird Exoskeletons: Propositional Politics and the

Making of Home in Underground Bucharest." International Journal of

Urban and Regional Research. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12787.

Lancione, Michele. 2018. The Politics of Embodied Urban Precarity: Roma

People and the Fight for Housing in Bucharest, Romania. Geoforum. Epub

ahead of print.

372

Larkin, Brian. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure." Annual Review of

Anthropology 42:327-43.

Lattimore, R. 1951. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lazarus, Neil. 2012. "Spectres Haunting: Postcommunism and Postcolonialism."

Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48(2):117-29.

Lees, Loretta. 2012. "The Geography of Gentrification: Thinking through

Comparative Urbanism." Progress in Human Geography 36(2):155-

71.

Lees, Loretta, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales, eds. 2015.

Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement.

Bristol: Policy Press.

Lemon, Alaina. 2000. Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani

Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism. Durham: Duke University

Press.

Lemon, Alaina. 2018. Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and

Telepathic Rays. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Leslie, S. and M. Kenney. 2000. "The Biggest 'Angel' of Them All: The

Military and the Making." Pp. 48-70 in Understanding Silicon Valley:

The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Leu, Corneliu. 1987. Vaporul Alb [the White Boat] (1979), Republished in Faptele

De Arme Ale Unor Civili in Secolul Razboaielor Mondiale Sau Ce

Inseamna Puterea [the Army Deeds of Some Civilians in the Century of

373

World Wars and What Power Means]. Bucharest: Albatros Publishing

House.

Levy, Robert. 2001. Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Light, Duncan. 2001. "Facing the Future: Tourism and Identity-Building in Post-

Socialist Romania." Political Geography 20(8):1053-74.

Lonely Planet. 2015, "The Top Region to Visit in 2016, Transylvania.”

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEzjvhdJLaM.

Lothian, Alexis. 2018. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility.

New York: New York University Press.

Lowe, Lisa. 1990. "Rereadings in Orientalism: Oriental Inventions and

Inventions of the Orient in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes." Cultural

Critique 15(1):115-43.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Ludden, David. 2003. “Why Area Studies?” In Ali Mersepassi, Amrita Basu

and Frederick Weaver, eds. Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing

World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, 131–136. Syracuse, NY:

Syracuse University Press

Luu, Linda. 2018, "Recap: Scholars for Social Justice Twitter Chat." Hastac Blog.

Available at: ht-twitter-chat.

MacDougald, Park. 2015. "The Darkness Before the Right." The Awl, September

28. Available at: ht-the-Right-The-Awl.

374

Maharawal, Manissa and Erin McElroy. 2018. "The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project:

Counter Mapping and Oral History toward Bay Area Housing Justice."

Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108(2):380-89.

Maharawal, Manissa M. 2017. "San Francisco's Tech-Led Gentrification: Public

Space, Protest, and the Urban Commons." Pp. 48-61 in City Unsilenced,

Jeffrey Hou and Sabine Knierbein eds. New York: Routledge.

Maharawal, Manissa M. and Erin McElroy. 2017. "The Anti-Eviction Mapping

Project: Counter Mapping and Oral History toward Bay Area Housing

Justice." Annals of the American Association of Geographers:1-10. doi:

10.1080/24694452.2017.1365583.

Maharawal, Manissa M., Erin McElroy, Patrick Cockburn Bjarke S. Risager Maja

H. Bruun and Mikkel Thorup. 2017. "In the Time of Trump: Housing,

Whiteness, and Abolition." Pp. 109-25 in Contested Property Claims: What

Disagreement Tells Us About Ownership. New York: Routledge.

Makalani, Minkah. 2011. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black

Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press.

Makimoto, Tsugio and David Manners. 1997. Digital Nomad. New York:

Wiley.

Maloutas, Thomas. 2012. "Contextual Diversity in Gentrification Research."

Critical Sociology 38(1): 33-48.

Manske, Scott L. and et al. 2006. Roșia Montană, Romania: Europe's Largest

Gold Deposit. Society of Economic Geologists.

375

Marez, Curtis. 2013. "Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the History of

Star Wars." In Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White eds. Race After the

Internet, 85-108. New York: Routledge.

Marius, Turda and Aaron Gilette. 2014. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective.

London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Mark, James and Péter Apor. 2015. "Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the

Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–

1989." The Journal of Modern History 87(4):852-91. doi: 10.1086/683608.

Mark, James, Quinn Slobodian, Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson. 2018.

"Eastern Europe." in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire.

Marti, Fernando. 2019. "Yimby, White Privilege, and the Soul of Our Cities."

Shelterforce, February 19. Available at:

https://shelterforce.org/2019/02/19/yimby-white-privilege-and-the-soul-of-

our-cities/.

Martin, Terry. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in

the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Marx, Karl and Fredrich Engels. 1967. The Communist Manifesto [1848]. London:

Penguin.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867):

Harmondsworth.

Masco, Joseph. 2006. Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold

War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

376

Masco, Joseph. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the

Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham: Duke University Press.

Masco, Joseph. 2016. "Nuclear Pasts, Nuclear Futures; or, Disarming through

Rebuilding.” Critical Studies on Security 3(3):308-12.

Matzal, Andra. 2018. "‘Am trăit patru revoluții.’ De vârstă cu România (‘I Have

Experienced Four Revolutions.’ Coming of Age in Romania).” Scena 9.

Available at: https://www.scena9.ro/article/pompiliu-sterian-de-varsta-cu-

romania

Mazower, Mark. 2008. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York:

Penguin.

Mbembe, Achille and Sarah Nuttall. 2008. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis.

Durham: Duke University Press.

McCain, John and others. 2016. "Joint Statement on Reports That Russia Interfered

with the 2016 Election." United States Senate Committee on Armed

Services.

McElroy, Erin. 2017. "Mediating the Tech Boom: Temporalities of Displacement

and Resistance." Journal of the New Media Caucus 13(1):38-57. doi:

10.21900/j.median.v13i1.3.

McElroy, Erin. 2019. "Data, Dispossession, and Facebook: Techno-

Imperialism and Toponymy in Gentrifying San Francisco." Urban

Geography 0(0):1-20. doi: 10.1080/02723638.2019.1591143.

McElroy, Erin and Andrew Szeto. 2018. "The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY

Bay Area Gentrification." Berkeley Planning Journal 29(1):7-44.

377

McElroy, Erin and Alex Werth. 2019. "Deracinated Dispossessions: On the

Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland, Ca." Antipode 51(3): 878-

898.

McGovern, S. 1998. The Politics of Downtown Development: Dynamic Political

Cultures in San Francisco and Washington DC. Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the

Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2013. "Plantation Futures." Small Axe: A Caribbean

Journal of Criticism 17(3):1-15.

McKittrick, Katherine and A. G. Weheliye. 2017. "808s & Heartbreak." Propter Nos

2(1):13-42.

Mecklin, John. 2016. "It Is Still 3 Minutes to Midnight: 2016 Doomsday Clock

Statement." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4.

Melamed, Jodi. 2006. "The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to

Neoliberal Multiculturalism." Social text 24(4(89)):1-24.

Melamed, Jodi. 2011. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the

New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Meseșan, Diana. 2016. “Romanian Roulette.” Balkan Insight, November 20.

Available at: https://balkaninsight.com/2016/11/20/romanian-roulette-11-

17-2016/

Miciu, Catalina. 2017. "Fabuloșii Ani '90 (the Fabulous '90s)." Scena 9, October

11. Available at: https://www.scena9.ro/article/fabulosii-ani-90.

378

Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures,

Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.

Minkah 2011, 38

Military Industrial Contracts. 2016. "IBM Military Defense Contracts."

Available at:

https://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/totals.asp?thisContracto

r=IBM.

Mirabal, Nancy. 2009. "Geographies of Displacement: Latina/Os, Oral History,

and the Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District." The

Public Historian 31(2):7-31. doi: 10/1525/tph.2009.31.2.7.

Mireanu, Manuel. 2019. "Security at the Nexus of Space and Class: Roma and

Gentrification in Cluj, Romania." Huub van Baar, Ana Ivasiuc and Regina

Kreide eds., The Securitization of the Roma in Europe, Human Rights

Interventions, pp. 115-36.

London: Springer International Publishing.

Mitchell, Donald. 1992. "Iconography and Locational Conflict from the

Underside: Free Speech, People's Park, and the Politics of Homelessness

in Berkeley, California." Political Geography 11(2):152-69.

Mitchell, William. 1996. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Cambridge:

MIT Press.

Moga, Cristi and Ioana David. 2010. "Cea Mai Mare Tranzacte Cu Terenuri Din

Ultimii Doi Ani: Ikea a Cumparat Terenul De La Timpuri Noi Pentru a

Face Turnuri De Birouri Sii Locuinte (The Largest Land Transaction on

379

The Last Two Years: Ikea Bought the Land at Timpuri Noi to Make

Office Towers and Dwellings.)" Ziarul Financiar. Available at: ht-

ultimii-doi-ani-ikea-a-cumparat-terenul-de-la-timpuri-noi-pentru-a-face-

turnuri-de-birouri-si-locuinte-6557916.

Moodie, Megan and Lisa Rofel. Forthcoming. "Feminist Theory Redux:

Neoliberalism’s Public/Private Divide."

Moodie, Megan. 2015. We Were Adivasis: Aspiration in an Indian Scheduled Tribe.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moore, David. 2001. "Is the Post-in Postcolonial the Post-in Post-Soviet? Toward a

Global Postcolonial Critique." PMLA 116(1):111-28.

Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the

Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso.

Moretti, Franco. 1988. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of

Literary Forms. New York: Verso.

Morin, G. 2016. "Romania Is Not the Land of the Poor." Medium.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the

Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer

Futurity. New York: NYU Press.

Murawski, Michał. 2019. Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist

Warsaw, and a City Transfixed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

380

Murawski, Michał. 2018. "Actually-Existing Success: Economics, Aesthetics and

the Specificity of (Still-)Socialist Urbanism." Comparative Studies in Society

and History 60(4):907-37.

Mureșan, Maria. 2008. "Romania's Integration in Comecon: The Analysis of a

Failure." The Romanian Economic Journal 11:27-58.

Nastja. 2017. "Gagarin’s Past." Stalker, August 10. Available at:

https://abandonedme.com/2017/08/10/gagarins-past/

Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1948. The Unity of India: Collected Writings 1937-40. London:

Lindsay Drummond.

Nelson, Alondra. 2002. "Introduction: Future Texts." Social Text 20(2):1-15.

Neocleous, Mark. 2003. "The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx's Vampires."

History of Political Thought 4:668-84.

Nguyen-Vo, Thu-Huong, and Grace Kyungwon Hong. 2018. "The Grammar

of Failure: Dispossession, Mourning, and the Afterlife Of Socialist

Futurities." Social Identities 24(2):155-172.

Niebuhr, Robert. 2011. "Nonalignment as Yugoslavia's Answer to Bloc Politics."

Journal of Cold War Studies 13:1.

Noi. 2018. “Дуб Гагарина" в Калараше вырос из жёлудя, который побывал в

космосе (In the Village of Pealeshty of the Kalarsh District, an Oak Was

Grown from an Acorn, Which Yuri Gagarin Took with Him into Space).”

Noi, October 17. Available at: https://noi.md/ru/obshhestvo/dub-gagarina-

v-kalarashe-vyros-iz-zhyoludya-kotoryj-pobyval-v-kosmose.

381

Northup, George T. 1915. "The Influence of George Borrow upon Prosper

Mérimée." Modern Philology 13(3):143-156.

NTT Data. 2014. Embedded and Real Time Solutions. Available at:

https://ro.nttdata.com/services/embeddedservices

O'Mara, Margaret Pugh. 2015. Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the

Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

O’Neill, Bruce. 2016. Spaces of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global

Order. Durham: Duke University Press.

O'Neill, Bruce. 2018. "Corruption Kills." Cultural Anthropology.

Ogundoro, Oluwafisayo. 2018. “Nigeria and the Neocolonial Capitalist Structure.”

Medium, June 9. Avaible at: -may-26-2018-i-woke-up-from-my-six-hours-

rest-and-i-picked-up-my-b2c52617dbc8.

Oldenziel, Ruth. 2011. "Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire." In

Gabrielle Hecht, ed. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in

the Global Cold War, 13-41. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism and Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and

Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.

Oppenheim, Maya 2017. "UC Berkeley Protests: Milo Yiannopoulos Planned to

'Publicly Name Undocumented Students' in Cancelled Talk." The

Independent, February 3.

Ouředníček, Martin. 2016. "The Relevance of ‘Western’ Theoretical Concepts for

Investigations of the Margins of Post-Socialist Cities: The Case of Prague."

Eurasian Geography and Economics 57(4-5):545-64.

382

O’Neill, Bruce. 2019. "Stuck Here: Boredom, Migration, and the Homeless

Imaginary in Post-Socialist Bucharest." Urban Geography 0(0):1-18.

doi: 10.1080/02723638.2019.1571829.

Pacurariu, Francisc. 1975. Individualitatea Literaturii Latino-Americane [the

Individuality of Latin American Literature]. Bucharest: Univers Publishing

House.

Pavlínek, Petr and John Pickles. 2000. Environmental Transitions: Transformation

and Ecological Defense in Central and Eastern Europe. New York:

Routledge.

Pedersen, Susan. 2015. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of

Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Penn, Malcolm G. 1995. "Romania in the Global Microelectronics World." Paper

delivered at CAS '95.

Petcuț, P. 2004. "Samudaripenul (Holocaustul) Rromilor in Romania (Roma

Holocaust in Romania)." Studia Hebraica 4(1):225-29.

Petrovici, Norbert. 2014. "Personal Development and Flexible Contracts:

Depoliticized Class Struggles between Highly Skilled Workers and Manual

Workers in Cluj."

ERSTE Foundation.

Petrovici, Norbert. 2019. Working Status in Deprived Urban Areas and Their

Greater Economic Role. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Petrovici, Norbert, Cristina Raț, Enikö Vincze, Anca Simionca and Giovanni

Picker. 2019. "Racialized Labour of the Dispossessed as an Endemic

383

Feature of Capitalism." Pp. 1-38 in Racialized Labour in Romania.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Petrovici, Norbert, Enikö Vincze, Cristina Raț, and Giovanni Picker. 2019.

"Working Status in Deprived Urban Areas and Their Greater Economic

Role." Pp. 39-62 in Racialized Labour in Romania. New York: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Petrovszky, Konrad and Ovidiu Țichindeleanu. 2011. Romanian Revolution

Televised: Contributions to the Cultural History of Media. Cluj,

Romania: Idea Design and Print.

Petulla, S., T. Kupperman and J. Schneider. 2016. "The Number of Hate

Crimes Rose in 2016." CNN.

Platoff, Anne. 2012. "The 'Forward Russia' Flag: Examining the Changing Use of

the Bear as a Symbol of Russia." Raven: A Journal of Vexillology 19:99-126.

Poenaru, Florin. 2010. "Rîs, Lacrimi și Priviri Coloniale [Laughter, Gaze and

Colonial Glimpses]." CriticAtac, November 15. Available a-lacrimi-si-

priviri-coloniale/.

Poenaru, Florin. 2017. "What Is at Stake in the Romanian Protests?" LeftEast,

February 7. Available at: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/romanian-

protests/.

Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.

Popa, Bogdan. 2019. "Trans* and Legacies of Socialism: Reading Queer

Postsocialism in Tangerine." The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal

of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 5(2018):27-53.

384

Popescu, Monica. 2014. "On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola the Eastern

Bloc, and the Cold War." Research in African Literatures 45(3):91-109.

Popovici, Veda. 2014. "Delivering the City into the Arms of Capital:

Gentrification and the Harmlessness of Art in Bucharest." Gazeta de Arta

Politica.

Popoviciu, Tiberiu. 1969. Contribuţii ale Institutului de Calcul din Cluj la

Aplicarea Matematicii În Economie: Metode Noi și Probleme de

Perspectivă ale Cercetării Ştiinţifice (Contributions of the Cluj Computing

Institute to the Application of Mathematics in the Economy: New Methods

and Perspectives of Scientific Research, pp. 305-320. Bucharest: Editura

Academiei R.S.R.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Puchalski, Piotr. 2017. “The Polish Mission to Liberia, 1934–1938:

Constructing Poland's Colonial Identity.” The Historical Journal

60(4):1071-1096. doi:10.1017/S0018246X16000534

Pusca, Anca. 2015. "Representing Romani Gypsies and Travelers: Performing

Identity from Early Photography to Reality Television." International

Studies Perspectives 16(3):327-44.

Pusca, Anca M. 2016. Post-Communist Aesthetics: Revolutions, Capitalism,

Violence. London: Routledge.

Rai, Amit. 2019. Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India.

Durham: Duke University Press.

385

Ramírez, Magie M. 2017. "Decolonial Ruptures of the City: Art-Activism Amid

Racialized Dispossession in Oakland." University of Washington.

Ramírez, Magie M. 2019. “City as borderland: Gentrification and the policing of

Black and Latinx geographies in Oakland.” Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819843924.

Redacția. 2013. “Democrația Pumnului. Cinci Ani De La Represiunea

Manifestanților Anti-NATO (Democracy of the Fist: Five Years After the

Repression of the Anti-NATO Manifestations.” CriticAtac, April 1.

Available at: ht-manifestanilor-anti-nato/.

Reddy, Chandan. 2012. "Political Tears." Sw L. Rev 41:275-79.

Redmond, Tim. 2017. "What If the Housing Crisis Is Caused by Too Much

Growth?" 48 Hills, November 27. Available at:

https://48hills.org/2017/11/housing-crisis-caused-much-growth/

Reinhardt, A. 1997. "What Matters Is How Smart You Are." Bloomberg.

Available at: ht-you-are.

Richardson, Joanne and Nadia Len. 2009. The Anti-NATO Days, 2008. Available

at: https://archive.org/details/Reconstruction_antiNATO_days.

Right to the City. 2017. "#Gentrifier-in-Chief."

RISE Project. 2013. "Documentele Confidentiale Ale Afacerii Roșia Montană

(The Confidential Documents of Roșia Montană).”

Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical

Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

386

Robinson, Jennifer. 2002. "Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map."

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(3):531-54.

Robinson, Jennifer. 2011. "Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative

Gesture." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(1):1-

23.

Rodríguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez, Manuela Boatca, and Sérgio Costa. 2016.

Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. New

York: Routledge.

Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After

Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality,

and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rofel, Lisa. 2019. “The (Re-)Emergence of Entrepreneurialism in Postsocialist

China.” In Lisa Rofel and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, eds. Fabricating

Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-

Chinese Global Fashion, 119-160. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rofel, Lisa and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, eds. Fabricating Transnational

Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global

Fashion. Durham: Duke University Press.

Roman, Denise. 2007. Fragmented Identities: Popular Culture, Sex, and

Everyday Life in Postcommunist Romania. Lexington: Lexington Books.

387

Romania Insider. 2017. "Over 250,000 Customers Use Uber Services in Romania.”

Available at: https://www.romania-insider.com/250000-customers-use-uber-

services-romania (accessed 15 July 2018).

Rosca, Matei. 2014. "Ikea Funds Went to Romanian Secret Police in Communist

Era." The Guardian.

Rosdail, Jennifer. 2014, "The Quad: A Newly Defined Meta Hood." Jennifer

Rosdail. Available at: http://www.jenniferrosdail.com/the-quad-is-born/.

Rose, White. 1943. Flugblätter Der Widerstandsbewegung in Deutschland.

Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.

Rosenberg, David. 2002. Cloning Silicon Valley: The Next Generation High-Tech

Hotspots. New York: Reuters.

Rosenblatt, J. 2016. "Is Facebook's Facial-Scanning Technology Invading Your

Privacy Rights?" Bloomberg.

Roy, Ananya. 2014. "Worlding the South: Toward a Post-Colonial Urban Theory."

In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, 31-42 New York:

Routledge.

Roy, Ananya, Stuart Schrader and Emma Crane. 2015. "Gray Areas: The War on

Poverty at Home and Abroad." Pp. 289-314 in Territories of Poverty:

Rethinking North and South. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Roy, Ananya. 2016. "Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?". International Journal

of Urban and Regional Research 40(1):200-09. DOI: 10.1111/1468-

2427.12274.

388

Roy, Ananya. 2017. "Dis/Possessive Collectivism: Property and Personhood at

City's End." Geoforum 80: A1-A11.

Roy, Ananya and Gautam Bhan. 2013. "Lessons from Somewhere." Cityscapes 4.

Rubin, Gayle S. 2002. “Elegy for the Valley of Kings: AIDS and the Leather

Community in San Francisco,” In Kenneth Plummer, ed. Sexualities:

Difference and the Diversity of Sexualities, 183–226. New York: Routledge.

Ruse, Andrei. 2013. "Define: Hipster." Vice, September 5. Available at:

https://www.vice.com/ro/article/mgakb3/define-hipster.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

San Francisco Planning Department 2016. "Residential Pipeline Entitled Housing

Unites." San Francisco Planning Department. 2017. "Housing Balance

Report."

Sareeta, Amrute. 2016. Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian It Workers in

Berlin. Durham: Duke University Press.

Saul, Nicholas. 2007. Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and

Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century. London: Legenda.

Saxon, Wolfgang. 1989. “William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and

Theory on Race. New York Times, August 14. Available at:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/b

day/0213.html.

Schafran, Alex. "Debating Urban Studies in 23 Steps." City

18(3):321-30. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2014.906717.

389

Schafran, Alex. 2013. "Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San

Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure." International

Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(2):663-88.

Schiffman, Jeremy. 2014. "SF Mime Troupe Takes to the Bay In "Ripple Effect."

The San Francisco Examiner, July 3. Available at: ht-ripple-effect/.

Scholl, Inge. 1993. Die Weisse Rose. Frankfurt am Main Erweiterte Neuausgabe:

Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.

Scott, David. 2013. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Self, Robert. 2003. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar

Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shaw, Joe. "Platform Real Estate: Theory and Practice of New Urban Real

Estate Markets." Urban Geography 0(0). doi:

10.1080/02723638.2018.1524653.

Shi, Shu-mei. 2012. "Is the Post-in Postsocialism the Post-in Posthumanism?".

Social Text 110:1-24.

Shin, Hyun Bang Lees Loretta and Ernesto López-Morales. 2016. "Introduction:

Locating Gentrification in the Global East." Urban Studies 53(3):455-70.

Shohat, Ella. 2006. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Shulte, Elizabeth. 2016. "Hillary Clinton, Secretary of War." Jacobin, August 18.

Available at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/hillary-clinton-

secretary-state-war-drones/.

390

Sikor, Thomas, Johannes Stahl and Stefan Dorondel. 2009. "Negotiating Post-

Socialist Property and State: Struggles." Forests in Albania and Romania

Development and Change 40(1):171-93.

Silva, Denise Ferreira Da. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders

of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Singh, Nikhil Pal. 2009. "Cold War." Social Text 27(3):67-70.

Singh, Nikhil Pal. 2017. Race and America's Long War. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Slater, Tom. 2017. "Planetary Rent Gaps." Antipode 49(1):114-37.

Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. "The USSR as A Communal Apartment, Or How a

Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism." Slavic Review

53(2):414-452.

Slobodian, Quinn. 2013. "Bandung in Divided Germany: Managing Non-Aligned

Politics in East and West, 1955-63." The Journal of Imperial and

Commonwealth History 41(4):644-662

Sjӧberg, Ӧrjan. 2014. "‘Cases onto themselves?’ Theory and research on ex-

socialist urban environments." Geografie 119(4):299-319.

Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist

City. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Neil. 2010. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of

Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

391

Softech. 2017. "Romania Outsourcing Map." Available at:

https://softech.ro/romania-on-the-ceeoa-qa-outsourcing-map-20162017.

Sonneman, Toby. 1999. "Dark Mysterious Wanderers: The Migrating

Metaphor of the Gypsy." The Journal of Popular Culture 32(4):119-

139.

Southern Poverty Law Center. 2018. "Hate Map." Available at:

https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map.

Spivak, Gayatri C. 2000. "Megacity." Grey Room 1:8-25.

Spivak, Gayatri C. 2003. Death of a Disciplined New York: Columbia

University Press.

Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2016. "Soviet Debris: Failure and the Poetics of

Unfinished Construction in Northern Siberia." Social Research: An

International Quarterly 83(3):689-721.

Stan, Lavinia. 2006. "The Roof over Our Heads: Property Restitution in

Romania." Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics

22(2):180-205.

Stanley, Eric. 2018. "The Affective Commons: Gay Shame, Queer Hate, and

Other Collective Feelings." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

24(4):489-508.

Starosta, Anita. 2014. "Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Translations." boundary 2

41(1):203-27.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial Connections. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

392

Stehlin, John. 2016. "The Post‐Industrial ‘Shop Floor’: Emerging Forms of

Gentrification in San Francisco's Innovation Economy." Antipode

48(2):474-493.

Stein, Sam. 2019. Capital City: The Rise of the Real Estate State. New York:

Verso.

Stevens, Nick. 2017, "A Letter from Yuri Gagarin" Nick Stevens Graphics.

Available at: https://nick-stevens.com/2017/09/23/a-letter-from-yuri-

gagarin.

Stewart, Michael and Chris Hann. 2002. "Deprivation, the Roma and ‘The

Underclass.’” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia.

New York: Routledge.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. "Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination."

Cultural Anthropology 23(2):191-219.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. "Connected Histories: Notes Towards A

Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia." Modern Asian Studies 31(3):

735-762.

Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs

in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

Sze, Julie. 2006. “Boundaries and Border Wars: DES, Technology, and

Environmental Justice.” American Quarterly 58(3):791-814.

Szeto, Andrew and Toshio Meronek. 2017. "Yimbys: The Darlings of the Real

Estate Industry." Truthout, August 7. Available at:

393

https://truthout.org/articles/yimbys-the-alt-right-darlings-of-the-real-estate-

industry/.

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 2007. "Metropolitan life and uncivil death." PMLA 122(1):

316-320.

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 2009. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience

and the Makings of Globalization. Durham, North Carolina: Duke

University Press.

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 2013. "Life-times of Disposability Within Global

Neoliberalism." Social Text 31(2(115)):19-48.

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 2016. "City Everywhere." Theory, Culture & Society 33(7-

8):57-83.

Takahashi, Dean. 2011. "It's Alive: IBM's Watson Supercomputer Defeats

Humans in Final Jeopardy Match." Venture Beat. Available at:

https://venturebeat.com/2011/02/16/ibms-watson-wins-final-jeopardy-

match/.

Tallbear, Kim. 2014. "Standing with and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-

Indigenous Approach to Inquiry." Journal of Research Practice

10:17.

Tapalaga, Dan. 2013. "Ce Am Vazut la Protestul Anti-Roșia Montană (What I Saw

at the Anti-Roșia Montană Protests)." HotNews, September 3. ht-opinii-

15502279-vazut-protestul-anti-rosia-montana.htm.

Taylor, James. 2011. Life as a Digital Gypsy. Available at: ht-as-a-digital-gypsy/

(accessed 20 January 2015).

394

Thompson, Walter. 2016. “How Urban Renewal Destroyed the Fillmore In Order

to Save It.” Hoodline, January 23. Available at:

https://hoodline.com/2016/01/how-urban-renewal-destroyed-the-fillmore-

in-order-to-save-it.

Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2010. "Towards a Critical Theory of

Postcommunism: Beyond Anticommunism in Romania." Radical

Philosophy 159:26-31.

Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu and Corinne Kumar. 2013. "Vampires in the Living Room: A

View to What Happened to Eastern Europe after 1989 and Why Real

Socialism Still Matters." In Asking We Walk. The South as New Political

Imaginary, Vol. III. Bangalore, India: Streelekha.

Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2016. "The Modernity of Post-Communism." Pp. 117-

38 in Genealogies of Post-Communism. Adrian Sirbu and Alexander

Polgar, eds. Cluj, Romania: Idea Design & Print.

Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2017. "Socialist Romania and Postsocialist Transition on

the Path of Non-Aligned Development." Institute of the Present.

Țichindeleanu, Ovidiu. 2017. "Romania's Protests: From Social Justice to Class

Politics."CriticAtac, February 27.. Available at:

http://www.criticatac.ro/romanias-protests-from-social-justice-to-class-

politics/

Thatcher, Jim, David O'Sullivan, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2016. "Data Colonialism

through Accumulation by Dispossession: New Metaphors for Daily Data."

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(6):990-1006.

395

The Local. 2011. "Ikea Founder Admits to Secret Foundation." The Local, January

26. Available at: https://www.thelocal.se/20110126/31650.

Thorne, Benjamin M. 2011. "Assimilation, Invisibility, and the Eugenic Turn in

the 'Gypsy Question' in Romanian Society, 1938-1942." Romani Studies

21(2):177-205.

Threat Connect. 2016. "Does a Bear Leak in the Woods?" ThreatConnect, August

12. Available at: https://threatconnect.com/does-a-bear-leak-in-the-woods/.

Tiku, Natasha. 2014. "Oakland Rebels So Sickened by Techie Scum, They Barfed

on a Yahoo Bus." Valley Wag, April 2. Available a-probably-believe-what-

these-oakland-rebels-did-t-1557036480.

Tlostanova, Madina and Walter Mignolo. 2009. "Global Coloniality and the

Decolonial Option." Kult 6:130-47.

Tlostanova, Madina. 2012. "Postsocialist-Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary

and Global Coloniality." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48(2):130-42.

Tlostanova, Madina. 2017. Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art:

Resistance and Re-Existence. New York: Springer.

Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Toyama, Kentaro. 2014. "The Problem with the Plan to Give Internet Access to the

Whole World." The Atlantic, December 16. Available at: ht-to-give-internet-

to-the-whole-world/383744/.

Tracy, James. 2014. Dispatches against Displacement: Field Notes from San

Francisco's Housing Wars. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

396

Transylvania Hostel. 2018, "Best Work-Friendly Coffee Shops in Cluj-Napoca.”

Available at: https://hostelcluj.com/best-work-friendly-coffee-shops-cluj-

napoca-digital-nomads-guide/ (accessed 15 November 2018).

Trumpener, Katie. 1995. “The Time of the Gypsies: A 'People without

History' in the Narratives of the West.” In Kwame A. Appiah and

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. eds. Identities. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2000. "Inside the Economy of Appearances."

Public Culture 12(1):115-44.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2016. "Earth Stalked by Man." The Cambridge Journal

of Anthropology 3(1):2-16.

Turda, Marius. 2007. "The Nation as Object: Race, Blood, and Biopolitics in

Interwar Romania." Slavic Review 66(3):413-15.

Turner, Fred. 2013. The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism

from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Unequal Cities. 2019, "Housing Justice in #Unequalcities." Available at:

http://unequalcities.org/about.

Ujică, Andrei. 2010. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (film).

397

Valle, Melissa. 2017. “Revealing the Ruse: Shifting the Narrative of Colorblind

Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Available at: -shifting-the-narrative-of-colorblind-urbanism/.

Veen, P., J. Fanta, I. Raev, I. A. Biris, J. de Smidt and B. Maes. "Virgin Forests in

Romania and Bulgaria: Results of Two National Inventory Projects and

Their Implications for Protection." Biodiversity and Conservation

19(6):1805-19.

Verdery, Katherine. 1991. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural

Politics in Ceausescu's Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Verdery, Katherine. 1999. "Fuzzy Property: Rights Power and Identity in

Transylvania's Decollectivization." In Katherine Verdery and Michael

Burawoy, eds. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the

Postsocialist World, 53-8. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in

Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Verdery, Katherine. 2005. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and

Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Verdery, Katherine. 2014. Secrets and Truth: Ethnography in the Archive of

Romania's Secret Police. Budapest: Central European University

Press.

Vincze, Enikö. 2017. "The Ideology of Economic Liberalism and the Politics of

Housing in Romania." Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Europaea

62(3):29-54.

398

Viorel, Achim. 2004. The Roma in Romanian History. Budapest: Central

European University Press.

Vladimirskaya, Tatyana. 2018. “Так рождаются легенды: В Молдове никак не

могут найти дуб, который вырос из желудя, побывавшего с Гагариным

в космосе (Legends Are Born This Way: In Moldova There Is No Way

They Can Find an Oak That Grew out of an Acorn That Had Been in Space

with Gagarin)." KP.MD -Komsomolskaya Pravda). Retrieved from:

https://www.kp.md/daily/26820/3857189/.

Voyles, Tracy. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo

Country. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press.

Walker, Richard. 1995. "Landscape and City Life: Four Ecologies of Residence

in the San Francisco Bay Area." Ecumene 2(1):33-57.

Walker, Richard. 2004. "The Spectre of Marxism: The Return of the Limits to

Capital." Antipode 36(3):434-43.

Walker, Richard. 2016. "Why Is There a Housing Crisis?" in Eastbay Express,

March 23. Available at: ht-crisis/Content?oid=4722242.

Walker, Richard and Alex Schafran. 2015. "The Strange Case of the Bay Area."

Environment and Planning 47(1):10-29.

Walsh, Michael. 2016. "How Corporate American Bought Hillary Clinton for

$21 Million." New York Post, May 22. Available a-america-bought-

hillary-clinton-for-21m/.

Ward, Stuart. 2016. "The European Provenance of Decolonization." Past &

Present 230(1):227-60. doi: 10.1093/pastj/gtv044.

399

Wark, McKenzie. 1994. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wasiak, Patryk. 2014. “Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer

Users in Poland during the 1980s.” In Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel

eds. Hacking Europe, 129-150. London: Springer London Limited.

Watson, Jini Kim and Gary Wilder. 2018. "Thinking the Postcolonial

Contemporary." Pp. 1-30 in The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political

Imaginaries for the Global Present. New York: Fordham University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics,

and Black Feminist Theory of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Welch, Calvin. 2017a. "Alternative Facts and the Mayor's Housing Plan." 48 Hills,

February 28. Available at: https://48hills.org/2017/02/ed-lee-housing-

alternative-facts/.

Welch, Calvin. 2017b. "Scott Wiener's Housing Straw Man." 48 Hills, May 2.

Available at: https://48hills.org/2017/05/scott-wieners-housing-straw-man/.

Werth, Alex and Eli Marienthal. 2016. ""Gentrification" As a Grid of Meaning: On

Bounding the Deserving Public of Oakland First Fridays." City 20(5):719-36.

Wilder, Gary. 2015. "Review of the Book: Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time,

Memory, Justice, by D. Scott." The Journal of LatinAmerican and

Caribbean Anthropology 20(1):189-200.

Wittenstein, George. 1997, "Memories of the White Rose" The History Place.

Available at: http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/white-rose1.htm.

400

Wolff, Larry. 1994a. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization and the

Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Incorporation: Managed Democracy and the

Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wong, Queeni. "ACLU: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Aided Police

Surveillance of Protesters." Silicon Valley, October 11. Available at: ht-

aided-police-surveillance-of-protesters/.

Woodcock, Shannon. 2007. "Romania and Europe: Roma, Rroma and Tigani as

Sites for the Contestation of Ethno-National Identities." Patterns of

Prejudice 41(5):493-515.

Woodcock, Shannon. 2011. "A short history of the queer time of “post-socialist”

Romania, or are we there yet? Let’s ask Madonna." In Robert Kulpa, Joanna

Mizielinska, eds. De-centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern

European perspectives, 63-83. New York: Routledge.

Woods, Clyde. 2002. "Life after Death." The professional geographer 54(1):62-66.

Woods, Clyde. 2009. "Introduction: Katrina's World: Blues, Bourbon and the

Return to the Source." American Quarterly 61(3):427-53.

Worgaftik, Gabe. 2017. "Anti-Homeless Robot Covered in Barbecue Sauce,

Given Well-Deserved Ass-Kicking." in AV Club, December 15. Available

at: ht-1821337323.

World Bank. 2018. "Poverty Headcount Ratio at $1.90 a Day.” Available at:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?end=2015&locations=

401

EU&start=2015&view=map&year_high_desc=true (accessed 14 November

2018).

Wright, Chris. 2017. 2017. “The Corporate Roots of Early American 20th Century

Fascism.” Roar Magazine, April 26. Available at:

https://roarmag.org/essays/american-fascism-book-review/.

Wyly, Elvin, et al. 2012. "New Racial Meanings of Housing in America."

American Quarterly 64(3):571-604.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1994. "Afterword: Beyond Miranda's Meaning: Un/Silencing The

"Demonic Ground" Of "Caliban's Woman" C. Boyce and E. Fido. eds. Out

of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, Pp. 355-66 (Trenton, NJ:

Africa World Press).

Wynter, Sylvia and Katherine McKittrick. 2015. "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our

Species? Or to Give Humanness a Different Future." In Katherine

McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter eds. Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as

Praxis, 9-89. Durham, NC: Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American

Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham: Duke University Press.

Yurchak, Alexei. 2013. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The

Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yurchak, Alexei. 2017. "Trump, Monstration and the Limits of Liberalism." Paper

Presented at the American Ethnological Society Annual Meeting, Stanford

University.

402

Zak, Anatoly. 2019, "Vostok Lands Successfully" Russian Space Web. Available at:

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1_landing.html.

Zăloagă, Marian. "Professing Domestic Orientalism. Representing the Gypsy as

Musikant in the Transylvanian Saxons’ Writings of the Long 19th Century."

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai, Historia 57(2):1-28.

Zhang, Xudong. 2008. Postsocialism and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Zuk, Miriam and Karen Chappel. 2016. "Housing Production, Filtering and

Displacement: Untangling the Relationships." IGS Research Briefs.

Available at:

https://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images/udp_research

_brief_05 2316.pdf.

Zukin, Sharon and Laura Braslow. 2011. “The Life Cycle of New York's Creative

Districts: Reflections on the Unanticipated Consequences of Unplanned

Cultural Zones.” City, Culture and Society 2(3):131-40.

403

Endnotes

1 I am indebted to Megan Moodie for pointing me towards thinking connectivity as method. Her guidance was integral as I began drafting this conceptual intervention. 2 The Housing Justice in Unequal Cities was launched at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019, led by Ananya Roy. Comprised of various partners, myself included, the Network aims to address interconnected housing crises in various scales, maintaining “transnational, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational collaboration to tackle analytical and methodological problems pertaining to spatial exclusion.” By foregrounding the “realms of geographic inquiry, carceral geographies and land dispossession” it “builds data collection, data visualization, and story mapping tools that can capture the complex space-time geographies of housing precarity” (Unequal Cities 2019). 3 The Dark Enlightenment is a neo-fascist and “neo-reactionary” movement that considers itself to be paradigmatically opposite of the Enlightenment. It opposes democracy, and it is popular amongst far-right and “alt-right” bloggers in the US (Haider 2016). 4 Here I draw upon Katherine McKittrick’s observation that spatial matters are racial matters in contexts of Black diaspora (2006). 5 While numerous debates have endured since Edward Said’s 1978 writing of Orientalism as to its spatial and temporal purchase beyond the Middle East, arguably there are many Orientalisms (Bakić-Hayden 1995; Lowe 1990; Saul 2007; Todorova 1997; Wolff 1994; Zăloagă 2012). 6 In this section, I draw upon work co-authored with Alex Werth, which troubles the imposition of San Francisco-based urban study frameworks in Oakland, as well as comparative trends in gentrification studies (McElroy and Werth, 2019). I also draw upon ongoing conversations with Megan Moodie on the merits of connected rather than comparative methods. 7 At the time of this writing, the eviction is on hold. Meanwhile, Impact Hub has left the park 8 Perhaps queering and corrupting techno-normative narratives of corruption enacts a similar coding act as found in Marx’s interpretation of Hegel’s “negation of the negation” in Kapital. There, Marx describes how for Communism to manifest, first capitalism must negate feudalism, and then Communism must negate capitalism (1976, 837). Might the șmecher corruptions of anticommunist corruption narratives help also to produce something new, some queer excess of desires past and yet-to-come? 9 After archival material and news of Kamprad’s Nazi past was published in a Swedish newspaper in 1994, Kamprad publicly renounced his affiliation. However, years later in 2011, he claimed that “Per Engdahl was a great man, and I’ll maintain that as long as I live” (Asbrink 2018). IKEA didn’t know how to respond to resurfaced Nazi ties, and eventually donated $51 million donation to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in response. 10 Harvard paid over $100 million for the land incurred debt through the transaction, which IKEA assumed in exchange for obtaining 98 percent of Harvard’s property.

404

11 Redlining was a racist cartographic method implemented by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s, in which over a million homes across the United States were ascribed within “residential safety maps.” Areas were classified according to the age and type of buildings, but also the “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population,” who were considered “dangerous” to lend to (Green 2016). Red areas were considered most dangerous, secondarily, yellow ones. Communities of color suffered economically due to the limits that redlining set, and disinvestment made them ripe for speculators to profit later. Today, as the California Reinvestment Coalition and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project have found, banks and real estate investors profit in the designated red and yellow “off limit” areas (2018). This indicates what can be understood as contemporary urban revanchism, or reverse-redlining, processes exacerbated by the influx of technocapitalist wealth and speculation. Marxist geographer Neil Smith (1996) uses the term revanchism to describe the gentrification of late-20th century New York City. Building upon the political economy of late-19th century Paris and the withering of liberal urban policy, Smith understands the revanchist city as that in which neoliberal urban policies and forces enact revenge upon communities of color, working-class and poor neighborhoods, and queer spaces. 12 Technology innovation districts are often called clusters, and they are often understood as strategically grouped in order to accumulate capital. Many resemble each other, and they are thought to be clones of Silicon Valley. 13 There have been debates as to whether the Soviet Union can be theorized as an empire in its move to expand, as Moore (2001) and Lazarus (2012) well argue. One therefore cannot elide the importance of space when theorizing Soviet socialism. Neither can one ignore the importance of time under capitalism. Rather, I draw upon these ratio formations to stress differential structures of spatiotemporal valorization. 14 Bears have been used to symbolically denigrate Russians since the 16th century (Platoff 2012).